Microsoft Viva Learning Explained

Excited about Microsoft Viva Learning?

You may have seen Microsoft's announcements about Viva Learning or perhaps you're simply wondering what Viva Learning is?

This blog covers a number of your questions plus more...

What is Microsoft Viva Learning?

Viva Learning is a great addition to the Viva Suite as it gives the organisation one place to organise learning experiences. It allows people to discover and share professional training resources across the organization, and to track their learning progress.

You can serve up your own content hosted in SharePoint Online, as well as LinkedIn Learning and other Microsoft learning sources, but Viva Learning also supports integration with learning management systems (LMS) platforms such as Cornerstone, SABA and SAP Successfactors, as well as a number of third-party content providers, including edX, Pluralsight, Skillsoft and Coursera.

Your Microsoft 365/ Office 365 license and third party subscriptions will determine what you can use.

There are two types of Viva Learning licenses: seeded and premium. 

• Seeded is available to all paid MS Teams users.
• Premium is for those that require integration with 3rd party content providers and 3rd party LMS platforms.

Links to details on licensing and features are available below.

Viva Learning overview diagram

Here's a helpful diagram that was presented at Microsoft Ignite 2021. It illustrates Microsoft's vision of bringing data into the flow of work, and channeling the learning content experience from multiple sources while making content relevant and personalised.

Features included for all paid Teams users

This is what Microsoft refers to as the 'seeded' license, which effectively means that if you have any of the Microsoft 365 / Office 365 F1, F3, E4, A3, E5 to A5 licenses you get access to a decent amount of features, including:

• The Viva Learning app in Teams
• Access to a range of top courses from LinkedIn Learning, Microsoft Learn and Microsoft 365 Trainings
• Integration with the full LinkedIn Learning Library (a separate subscription to LinkedIn is needed)
• Interest-based personalisation
• SharePoint integration
• Search for learning content
• Share (to a Team or chat)
• Create learning tabs
• Bookmarking / My Learning
• View featured content

NOTE: Atlas customers will immediately have full support for MS Viva Learning integration with the Atlas workspace.

Premium features

For customers with more advanced learning and development requirements the premium version provides access to the following advanced features (with Microsoft promising more to come):

• Admin controls for featured learning content / campaigns
• Integration with 3rd party LMS (Learning Management Systems). (Separate subscriptions for those 3rd parties will be needed.)
• Integration with 3rd party learning content providers. (Separate subscriptions for those 3rd parties will be needed.)
• Recommendations / management

Licensing 

Premium features can be unlocked by purchasing one of the following license options :

• Microsoft Viva Learning (USD4 per user per month)
• Microsoft Viva (USD9 per user per month). This is also known as the Viva Suite.
• Microsoft Viva with Glint Add-on (USD12 per user per month)

Newly announced Viva Learning features

Learning Paths allow Admins, Knowledge Managers, and Learning Program Managers to create sequenced sets of learning resources from any of the sources configured within their Viva Learning tenant, and publish them to employees in their organization. Learning Paths can be created around any topic relevant to the organization; for example, how to set up an in-store display for retail employees. Learning Paths can be discovered, recommended, and shared by end users as a structured way to dive deep into a specific topic of interest.

Learning Collections allow individual users to create personal collections of learning content aligned to their interests or learning goals from any of the sources configured within their Viva Learning tenant. Anyone can create a learning collection, and either keep it private or choose to share and recommend it to colleagues within their organization. Collections are a great way to structure learning for specific groups or goals; for example, a manger could create a collection of helpful learning courses to share with new hires to accelerate onboarding. Collections can be found in the new “Collections” section of the My Learning tab.

New home page experience on Viva Learning mobile which will make it easy to see mandatory trainings along with personalized learning experiences for users. See the recent Viva Learning mobile update blog for details.

New capabilities in the Viva Learning Admin Tab enhance the Admin experience to include a number of new features – including the ability to see ingestion status and error logs for configured content sources, build learning paths, and configure user permissions for learning objects so people only see the content they have access to consume.

Integration with Viva Connections  will now surface required trainings in the new Viva home experience in Connections, so employees can see a snapshot of their learning tasks at-a-glace right at the top of the page.

Integration with the daily briefing email from Viva Insights will send employees personalized learning reminders to set aside time to complete mandatory assignments or trainings from their organization. With one click, employees can add time to their calendar for completing assigned courses that are upcoming or overdue.

You can also read more here:

• Viva Learning Overview