Enable Education and Sidekick: Partners in Digital Learning
Enable Education and Sidekick Training have become partners in digital learning, offering businesses the best live learning platform from Sidekick, and custom content, a learning management system, AR and VR, consulting, and bespoke automation, from Enable.
Who is Sidekick Training?
Sidekick Training is the platform that turns every employee into a learning and development professional.
Sidekick was born from Enable, and formed as a new SaaS product company. Enable Education collaborated on a social impact project for the National High School Ethics Bowl, which is administered by the Parr Center for Ethics at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. At the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, Ethics Bowl was looking for a technological solution that would ensure this incredibly beneficial event didn't fizzle out because they couldn't meet in person.
Structurally, Ethics Bowl is similar to a debate with multiple teams who are given a case to discuss, and judges who make decisions based in-part on how the team engages. In the early days of the pandemic, Ethics Bowl showed that they could run an event using Zoom with break-out groups, but they quickly realized the overhead of managing the format and getting the right people into the right rooms at the right time was challenging.
Enable Education built Ethics Bowl a solution that allowed them to automate the process that they ran in Zoom and provided it to them at a much-reduced cost.
When Covid hit, facilitating live learning with teams that were abruptly distributed created an immediate and global obstacle to employee training and development. While many of Enable’s clients were incredibly knowledgeable subject matter experts (SMEs), most were not skilled virtual facilitators.
Enable believed they could address this pain point by applying structure, process, and automation, much like they'd done for Ethics Bowl, and create an effective and measurable, live-learning component of training.
The pandemic has brought about a change in the way we see the office, the way we see work, and the way we see teams. According to McKinsey, 87% of people surveyed don't want to be in an office all the time anymore. Now more than ever they need an engaging and effective way to connect and learn virtually with their teams. This includes the data to help them grow and improve.
Sidekick is a response to this change in the workforce, the change in office life, and the change in how we see work in general. Sidekick provides solutions for teams to connect, learn, and engage from anywhere with anyone.
Why the Partnership?
Since Ben and Amy founded the company, Enable has grown and evolved to become an end-to-end learning experience design and development company with clients ranging from K-12 education institutions and non-profit organizations, to multinational engineering firms, manufacturing organizations, and game development companies. Enable is ideally positioned to provide the learning service, while Sidekick provides the product.
Experience
For the past 15 years, Enable has been solving learning challenges and providing clients with training solutions. These have typically included a combination of creating content, video, and interactive experiences, and deploying learning experiences on a learning management platform (LMS). Enable’s success in creating solutions with a wide range of organizations gives us a broad lens through which to view organizational learning needs. No two companies are the same, so no two learning solutions are the same. That's why customization is a key principle of learning experience design for both Sidekick and Enable.
Processes
At Enable, we follow a robust analysis process based on adult learning principles and learning industry best-practices. This ensures that right from the start of any project, the learner is placed at the center of the learning experience.
Enablers
The Enable Education team has a mix of diverse professional and educational backgrounds, areas of interest, and expertise. With experience in both academic and corporate education, as well as experience working in internal L&D departments, the Enable team is well-positioned to provide expert advice and support on education and training.
Innovation
Through ongoing learning, networking, and listening to what the market tells us, Enable not only responds to the needs of clients, but is able to stay a step ahead in learning and development.
Why Enable and Sidekick are a Great Team
Sidekick offers a virtual live learning platform that amplifies virtual instructor-led training (VILT) by providing tools and features that allow businesses to:
Quickly create, customize, and replicate live learning events tailored to their unique needs
Boost participation in professional development using structured polls, quizzes, and breakout groups to deepen learning in the flow of work
Improve learner engagement with gamification
Reduce bias using automation to foster a positive culture
Leverage real-time data from learning events to drive improvement and ensure accountability
For clients who simply need a better live learning platform, the Sidekick team is ready to help. We also know that many businesses require custom content, a learning management system, AR and VR, consulting, or bespoke automation. The Enable team is here to create these custom solutions for Sidekick clients when they need them.
If you’d like to chat about a learning challenge, or to discuss how Enable Education can help you, reach out and schedule a call with one of our team – we’d love to hear from you!