Introducing iLearning Courses

NEOMA’s new iLearning courses are immersive, interactive, and inspirational. They integrate interactive content, expert interviews, and web series, all designed as an entertaining and demanding digital learning path.

Call to Action

The COVID-19 pandemic and the rise of GAFA (Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple) in all areas of training led us to propose premium-quality digital content online because, when it comes to e-learning, a digitalized PowerPoint will not suffice. Content must be engaging, interactive, and meet the demands of today’s student population.

Students are addicted to their smartphones and social media, such as Instagram, Snapchat, and TikTok, and they also watch the latest videos from their favorite YouTubers. It became a daily challenge to engage them with academic content and lure them away from their smartphone notifications to stay focused and open to learning. We decided to offer academic and professional content that came as close as possible to the content that already hooked them so students would remain captivated, engaged, and focused on a more enjoyable and sustainable learning experience.

Based on our student feedback, we decided to call them iLearning courses. The “i” stands for interactive, immersive, and inspiring.

• Interactive: Students interact with the course content by listening, observing, thinking, and clicking at every moment to keep learning.
• Immersive: Students do not merely complete the requirements of a NEOMA Business School course, they immerse themselves in their own learning universe, with its own atmosphere and ambiance.
• Inspiring: Students are inspired to reflect on their vision and the impact of technology in the world.

Innovation Details

NEOMA wanted to provide all students with a digital transformation specialization, enabling them to understand the challenges and impacts of digital transformation for people, organizations, and society. The project consisted of three e-learning courses that allowed students to identify core technologies and their different levels of impact, understand data management and its consequences on organizations and business models, and develop a change management strategy and its operational implementation. These modules can constitute a complete online course or be part of a blended learning or face-to-face course. They are innovative because they involve:

• Dynamic, pedagogical sequencing outside of traditional learning habits.  
• An ability to generate emotions in students.
• Strong student interactivity through a fun and inspired approach.
• References to popular culture and visual and language codes relevant to the targeted students.
• A variety of innovative digital methods combining rapid learning modules, interactive modules, interviews with experts, and interactive web series involving NEOMA employees.

These courses are bilingual, in English and French. The three courses we developed within the digital transformation specialization are:

• Digital Literacy—aiming to understand the contingency factors relating to digital transformation and innovation opportunities.
• Digital Transformation and Change Management—aiming to strengthen the students’ ability to use disruptive digital technologies and create innovative business models, processes, systems, and strategies.
• Data Management—aiming to establish both a technical and operational understanding of data management.

Innovation Impact

As with our MOOCs and serious games, NEOMA has created a new standard of educational content. Students no longer merely take an online course, they experience entertainment. They don’t answer assessment questions, they try to hack into a data center. They don’t watch an expert video, they attend a meeting with the best experts themselves and can select the questions to ask them. They don’t watch a program about the course, they follow a TV show—just like on Netflix, with its plot, characters, and twists.

iLearning courses are born out of the convergence of traditional course content and the world of YouTube video, TV shows, video games, and popular culture. Each course has a strong identity with its own atmosphere and universe, using colors, sounds, plot twists, and references to popular culture, all linked to the theme of the course.

For example, in evoking the technological world it presents, the Digital Literacy course offers a combination of dark and vivid colors, computer interfaces and sounds, as well as humorous and deftly chosen cultural references to technology. Many IT enthusiasts will laugh when they see the Minitel interface—a technology developed by the French company France Telecom (now Orange) that offered a telemetry service that was a precursor to the internet—appear on their screen to answer an assessment quiz.