As part of our first Viva Summit, we’re excited to announce a set of new features and engagement opportunities with Microsoft Viva Learning. You can watch the full session at aka.ms/MicrosoftVivaSummit to see how Viva can help you grow and engage your workforce, including a panel discussion with Johann Laville – Chief Learning Officer at Merck and John George – Chief Information Officer at ICF.
Announcing Academies in Viva Learning
We’re excited to announce a new way of organizing and delivering learning resources within Viva Learning. Announced today and available soon, academies enhance organizations’ ability to curate role and line-of-business specific experiences to target individuals with highly engaging and relevant learning opportunities.
Learning academies will show up in Viva Learning as a new tab within the top navigation bar, alongside Home (for your learning homepage), My Learning (for your personalized learning snapshot), Manage (for managing learning recommendations), and Admin (for admins functions). Academies are configurable by admins, knowledge admins, and knowledge managers and build upon previously released learning path and featured set capabilities.
Admins can provide access permissions to academies via Microsoft 365 groups – for example you may want a Finance Academy just for your finance team, a Sales Academy just for your sales team, and a Culture Academy for everybody. Individuals can receive access to multiple academies and navigate between them as a drop down selection.
Multiple teams at Microsoft are already using academies – it’s proving to be a great method to discover relevant learning opportunities in a way that’s easily accessible, expert curated, and available within the flow of everyday work.
Academies will be generally available by mid-2023.
Announcing new API availability
We’re also excited to announce two new updates related to our set of publicly available Microsoft Graph APIs, which enables any learning system to integrate with Viva Learning.
First, our employee learning API is now generally available. The employee learning API in Microsoft Graph enables apps to make content from a learning management system (LMS) or learning provider available in Viva Learning. Use the following resources to integrate with Viva Learning:
- Learning provider to manage learning providers, including registering, enabling, disabling, or deleting providers.
- Learning content to upload and manage learning content metadata from your LMS or learning provider in Viva Learning.
Second, our course activity API will enter into public preview on May 1st. The course activity API synchronizes learners' records like assignments, recommendations, self-initiated courses, and completion statuses into the Viva Learning user experience.
As part of our private preview, LMS365 utilized this new set up APIs to bring assignments and course activity records into Viva Learning so users can easily access as part of their everyday workflow.
“By bringing together LMS365 and Microsoft Viva Learning, we’re able to facilitate and support more intuitive ways of learning. Learners can browse a centralized catalog view of learning opportunities that display LMS365 coursework alongside content from separate learning systems via Viva Learning. This extends the LMS365 experience beyond the existing native integration with Microsoft Teams and into Viva Learning, which supports the continuous learning movement in organizations and empowers individual employees to grow,” says Flemming Goldbach, Chief Product Officer.
We’re excited to continue working with LMS365, our other partners in preview, and the rest of the learning partner ecosystem as we continually expand our API offerings to deliver an extensible platform with Viva Learning.
Announcing Viva Learning web endpoint
We’re also announcing today a new way to access Viva Learning. Now generally available, you can use Viva Learning to accelerate your growth and learning journey directly from your web browser. Accessible at https://aka.ms/VivaLearningWeb, this web endpoint provides all the same features users have available to them in the Viva Learning app for Teams.
The Webapp auto signs users into their Viva Learning account and personalizes the experience by adapting to preferred theme and language settings, and is available to all users with access to the Viva Learning app for Teams. The Webapp is currently compatible with Microsoft Edge, Google Chrome and in preview in Safari.
Announcing the new Viva Learning Community
We’d like to invite you to join our newly launched Viva Community – at Aka.ms/vivacommunity/VivaLearning. As a member, you will have access to all our content in the Community, curated just for you, conversations with experts, and a forum for asking questions.
If you are joining us during the Viva Summit event livestream, we have a couple great ways for you to continue engaging with our amazing speakers. You can join the live Ask-Me-Anything (AMA) session on the Viva Learning Community today (April 20th) from 10:30-11:30AM PST. We'll have a group of Learning Culture Champs online from both Microsoft and partner organizations to answer your questions about all things learning. These live AMAs will also be available in the Viva Community afterwards.
We look forward to talking with you soon, and make sure to stay tuned for additional exciting updates in May.
As always we’ll see you learning in the flow of work!