How I Built a Conversational Learning Course in Develop

How do you measure whether training worked? Seat time, course completion, a quiz at the end, a satisfaction score: each one is a proxy for learning, and none of them confirm that a person understood the material or could apply it a week later. The Ebbinghaus forgetting curve shows that the average person loses roughly 70% of what they learned within 24 hours. AI shortens the shelf life of skills, because roles are changing faster than annual training cycles can keep up, and the organizations that keep pace will be the ones that can build new capability quickly. Develop was built to confirm that capability rather than merely track participation, and I learned the most about how it does that by building a course in it myself.

Why Did We Build a Course for Ourselves First?

When we launched the People Activation System, we wanted every Pyxer to be able to answer the most basic question a customer, a recruit, or a seatmate on a flight might ask: what does Perceptyx do? Our system connects employee listening and development so organizations can discover what needs to change, activate the behaviors that drive it, and develop the capability to sustain it. Explaining that clearly, in your own words, is its own skill, and we wanted people to practice it before they needed it.

So we drank our own champagne, which is the nicer way of saying we used our own product on ourselves. Develop is the development piece of this very system, and building our onboarding-style course in it allowed us to teach the answer and test whether it stuck, using the exact capability we tell customers about.

How Do You Build a Course in Develop?

It doesn’t get much simpler than this. From the Develop main page, you click +Create Course and answer four questions. The questions are short, but they do a lot of the heavy lifting because the system builds the course around your answers.

1. Describe your audience, including their role, background, and familiarity with the topic.
   A course for a confirmed novice looks very different from one for an expert, so this answer shapes the starting difficulty. Mine was a mixed internal audience, some deep in the platform — such as product and marketing managers — and some in support roles with less hands-on interaction.
2. What should a learner be able to do on the job after completing this? Set your learning objectives here. I wanted people to be able to understand the components of the People Activation System and how they all fit together such that they could comfortably answer the question, ‘What does Perceptyx do?’ with whoever asked.
3. What do people typically get wrong about this, even after training? Name the common pitfalls and misconceptions here. In my experience the system latches onto them and makes sure the generated objectives address them, so be specific. Develop does a great job of steering learners to both what they should and should not know about the content.
4. Any constraints or special instructions for how this course should be structured? Use this field for anything else. I asked for a short module and a role-play ending, which I describe below.

You also upload at least one source document for the system to build from. I uploaded a few PDFs and a presentation. Develop absorbs that material and structures it into learning objectives. You can choose to make the uploaded files available to participants and let the course pull in images or video for multimodal learning.

After you answer the four questions, the system generates the course in about three minutes. I ran a couple of iterations totaling about 15 minutes total from start to finish. You then review the AI-generated learning objectives, make any small adjustments, and preview the course. Previewing lets you sit in the learner's seat and have the conversation yourself before launching the course. When you are ready, you invite people by email or direct link. I recommend email, because it lets you track enrollment and send reminders.

What Makes the Learning Experience Different for Each Person?

Develop delivers learning as a one-on-one conversation rather than a static module. Develop’s conversational agent can engage in an inquiry-based discussion, role-play, facilitate teach-backs, help learners brainstorm – it meets learners where they are at. All courses open by asking the learner how familiar they already are with the topic and adjusts from there, spending more time where someone has gaps and moving quickly through what they already know. Because the conversation adapts, no two people get exactly the same course.

The variation is deliberate: a fixed module treats an expert and novice the same, while an adaptive conversation meets each of them where they are. While the learner talks, Develop’s Learning Validation Agent scores their responses in real time against the objectives I set, providing a comprehension score. The system can also tell the difference between real engagement and clicking through. In other words, a learner cannot receive a high comprehension score if they are just skimming because the conversation itself facilitates (and requires) the deep processing critical for durable understanding and skill transfer. You end up with a record of what each person understood, taken from what they said rather than from whether they reached the last screen.

For example, my co-author for this piece, Perceptyx’s Head of Content and Editorial Oliver Bateman, took the course and started by explaining that he had played a supporting role in writing much of the marketing material related to Develop. His conversation went in a sophisticated direction right from the start. Develop asked him more difficult questions from the get-go knowing that he was already well-versed in the materials.

What Did Pyxers Say About Learning This Way?

The feedback I valued most came from people who may have less day-to-day interaction with the Perceptyx platform. One Pyxer told me:

I don't have a lot of exposure to the platform in my role, so getting to talk about it in a no pressure situation was really helpful. I felt that I could ask all the questions I've maybe not wanted to ask in larger settings, and I feel that I am now more confident than ever sharing what we do.

Another pointed to the part that separates Develop from watching a presentation:

The training was engaging and being able to truly "test" my understanding of the content was great. Listening to others teach the content and/or reading through slides is one thing but having to respond in my own words to confirm comprehension was very valuable and helps me feel much more prepared to discuss it with a customer. Also the experience itself is gradual and low pressure.

One of our most senior leaders, CHRO Lisa Sterling, put it this way:

This was the most engaging and fun learning I have been through in a long time. I love how it was personalized to me, leaned into the elements that were important to me. I can't wait to roll this out further.

All three responses show the same mechanism at work: having to explain a concept in your own words, and being asked why you think it, builds more confidence than hearing someone else explain it.

What Can You See After People Take the Course?

Once people start finishing, the admin view fills with more than a completion count. You can see comprehension against each objective, along with conversational sentiment and depth, so you know not only whether someone finished but how seriously they engaged. The Skills Strategist AI agent rolls those individual sessions up into Knowledge and Skill Gaps, Strengths, and Pattern Analytics across everyone who took the course.

The pattern analytics carry a confidence rating of low, medium, or high. A high-confidence insight means the system is seeing a consistent pattern across enough responses to trust it. For an L&D team, that turns a single course into a read on where the wider group is strong and where the next round of training or enablement should focus.

How Does the Learning Stick After the Course Ends?

Develop allows you to build custom nudges to be deployed post-training. If you enable them, the nudges someone receives after finishing reinforce what they learned, delivered through Activate in the tools where they already work.

In a randomized controlled trial of 226 managers and 4,442 employees, Haunstrup and Jensen (2024) found that training plus just-in-time nudges produced behavior change still measurable eight months later, while training alone did not. Develop scores comprehension during the session, and Activate allows you to see who is actively engaging with subsequent reinforcement.

What Would I Tell Someone Building Their First Course?

A handful of practical tips and insider tricks made my courses better, and I would pass them to anyone building their first one.

Prioritize relevance with your supporting materials. While you only need one source document to start, adding extra materials gives the system more data to reference and more media to extract. However, the more your supporting materials are aligned with your course goals, the better. You can also instruct Develop on which materials to focus on and which to use as supporting context. Note that Develop allows you to add modules after a course was created, which lets you re-answer the four planning questions and upload additional materials for maximum control. I uploaded a few highly relevant PDFs and a presentation, and it made the course incredibly hyper-tailored.

Shape the experience with explicit constraints. Develop is smart enough to build topics on its own, but you can override its settings if you have specific goals in mind. By using the constraints field, you can set parameters like restricting the scope to a single module for shorter content. You can also establish a strict source hierarchy by instructing Develop to train the learner primarily on "Supporting material A" while using "Supporting materials B and C" strictly for background context. Finally, you can request custom interactive elements, such as ending the session with an active role-play where the learner is prompted to answer a question, such as ‘What does Perceptyx do?’ out loud. Because the session is generated dynamically rather than from a fixed template, precise constraints can transform the learning experience.

Edit objectives for small changes, rebuild for big ones. If you have created a course and want to make minor adjustments, great! You can tweak minor things like course title, description, or supporting materials, easily. However, should you wish to change the course objectives or want other moderate to large changes, I would recommend you rebuild the course. Edit the four questions to reflect your change. Rebuilding takes minutes, but it ensures your changes are made appropriately.

How Can You Try This in Your Organization?

If you have ever signed off on a training budget and had no way to answer whether it worked, take: Develop is built to address that question. It turns the content you already own into adaptive conversations and gives you evidence of comprehension in place of a completion rate. You can see how Develop works here, read more about the design of our Live Learning Agents, and check out this article to learn what validated comprehension means for L&D measurement.

When you want to see it run on your own content and priorities, schedule a 30-minute demo.