OttoLearn® FAQ

A learner will typically access Otto on their mobile device. They’ll be prompted to participate in short personalized learning sessions called Training Sessions. Training Sessions will consist of a series of Activities which Otto has determined are the most valuable to raise that learner’s level of knowledge to the pre-defined Mastery Goal level.

Any phone, tablet or computer running a modern browser. Along with extensive web browser support, we have iOS and Android applications available for download in their respective stores. Our focus will be to have strong support for older or low powered devices, as well as low bandwidth or high latency connections.

Yes, Otto, our mobile microlearning platform, can be used on pretty much any device that has a modern web browser, including desktops, laptops, tablets and mobile devices.

A Training Session is a brief personalized learning session, where a learner is presented with a series of Activities, which Otto determines are the most important Activities to increase that learner’s mastery.

Prompts are governed by an “engagement profile”, which allows you to determine how often and on which days learners should be prompted. You have both an account-wide default engagement profile, and you can also set overrides at the group or user level.

Currently engagement profiles can only be set for the number of prompts per day. In the future, there will be options to instead target for mastery by a certain date, or allow the learner to set their own prompting schedule.

A Training Session is prompted by the Otto application, whereas a Training Moment is initiated by the learner. The learner can even do Training Moments for items which have unmet prerequisites — this is a great way for them to “learn ahead”.

No. Our philosophy is that learners should never be prevented from exploring content and learning ahead.

Not yet, but there will be in the future.

Currently, we only support SMS notification messages. However, our production version will support email, SMS, app-based push notifications and browser notifications.

Learners are not currently able to shut off notifications.

Yes, you can create an Activity which prompts the learner for acknowledgement. However, since you have detailed analytics of the learner engaging through all the knowledge of all the Activities, you may not require this type of secondary acknowledgement.

Yes, you can prevent the learner from achieving mastery until they’ve acknowledged, however, we don’t recommend this type of acknowledgement process, since a best practice is that you will be continuously updating your content, and learners will receive updated content automatically on a daily basis.

Nothing — but that’s a good thing!

As long as you’ve designed multiple Activities that will exercise the knowledge of a Concept from multiple vectors, then the feedback should be largely irrelevant.

Our analysis shows that learners usually skip past the feedback when they are proficient, but spend time reading it when they are not, so the learners behave in a natural way.

Definitely! We find that with Otto, your learners will engage with your material on a daily basis, and actually perform Training Moments to learn faster!

Otto’s philosophy is to get the learner practicing as quickly as possible. If a learner is about to receive an Activity from a Topic that they’ve never been exposed to before, they will receive a “new Topic” message at the start of their Training Session or Training Moment.

A learner can read Knowledge Cards at any time, but there is no functionality to support pushing out Knowledge Cards to learners or delivering Activities only after they have viewed a certain Card. Pre-learning by the learner is purely optional.

Prompting for a confidence level is a very important part of our algorithm. For questions the learners have high confidence in, they’ll respond automatically — but for questions that they are a bit less confident in, we’ll be able to measure the delay in responding, and examine whether they change their answer before responding.

All of these, plus other signals that we are capture and measure, will be used to assess the learner’s mastery. (We want to understand the likelihood that the learner is guessing, or really knows the answer.)

Our goal is to get the learner to true mastery — being accurate, being fast, and with self-assessed “high” confidence.

There is a “cost” associated with the confidence selection which rewards them by moving up a mastery level when they are confident and proficient, or dropping them down if they are confident and not proficient. (By proficiency, we are referring not just to accuracy, but also whether the learner responded within a certain duration and other signals.)

This is how a learner’s mastery level (ML) is affected by the combination of their proficiency and confidence:

No, based on how well a learner did while increasing their mastery level, we will apply a proportional amount of “forgetting pressure” to reduce their mastery level over time. Learners that struggled to learn will lose mastery faster than learners that exhibited mastery quickly.

This helps determine how often Otto will “call back” to a Concept and provide the learner with an Activity in order to help them retain the knowledge.

We have a complex set of algorithms which are constantly evolving, based on machine learning techniques, in order to provide the most accurate representation of a learner’s proficiency, which is far more than just their accuracy.

Learn more about how OttoLearn works, as well as the science behind OttoLearn.

Content is organized in Modules, which can have one or more Topics, where each Topic can have zero or more Concepts. Each Concept must have at least 1 (and preferably 3+) Activities, which exercise the knowledge within the Concept.

Content is developed in the OttoLearn Content Studio, which is a web based application. Multiple authors can work simultaneously, either creating or editing Concepts and Activities.

Yes, you can include any combination of text, video and images within question, answer and answer feedback.

Within a Mastery Profile, you can specify which Modules should be assigned to learners, along with how deeply they should know it. It’s essentially a learning path or learning plan.

A Module is a group of Topics, for instance “Introductory Selling Skills”

A Topic is a group of Concepts. If you were building a sales training Module, then a Topic could be “How to Handle Client Objections”

A Concept is a building block of knowledge. If you were building a sales training course, then a Concept could be “How to handle a price objection.”

Activities are the actual practice exercises Otto will have your learners engage in. Each Activity is a multiple choice question, however, there are a number of different formats.

Each Concept has multiple Activities. Each time the learner successfully completes an Activity, they will increase a mastery level. However, the system does enforce a spacing before it will increase levels.

Otto defines six different mastery levels:

The Mastery Goal is the desired Mastery Level for a particular Module or Concept. This provides you with great flexibility to program your learning requirements, since not all of your learners require the same knowledge on each Topic.

Otto’s studio tool facilitates rapid content creation. To actually input an Activity into Otto will only take 2 minutes.

You can update content at any time and Otto will automatically ensure your learners are exposed to your updated content, without requiring administrator intervention, new enrollments, etc.

No. Otto is designed as a mobile first application, which means that it is obsessed with ensuring a super fast, and super low bandwidth mobile experience. Unfortunately, SCORM/AICC modules are really designed for desktop use, and are typically a "less than ideal" experience on mobile, so we do not support them.

When you build content in the Otto studio, you are ensuring that it will be universally usable by your learner’s devices.

Content version control can be accomplished by retiring and replacing Activities. Additional revision control options coming in 2018.

Absolutely, contact our sales team for a quote.

We can export content out in CSV, XML or JSON format. Additional formats are available as a service. Let’s talk about your specific requirements.