Ask the Expert is a feedback mechanism. It allows learners to send questions and comments to subject specialists about the lessons they take.

Ask the Expert serves at least two important purposes:

Before designating an expert, ensure that he or she owns the lesson. This article has more information about content ownership.

From Lessonly's Content page, select the lesson to which you want to appoint an expert. This will load the lesson's overview page. On the right side of the overview page, locate the Lesson Expert setting. Begin typing a user's name; Lessonly's autocomplete feature will attempt to identify the user you have in mind.

If a user's name fails to appear, verify that he or she owns the lesson. Also, ensure the would-be expert is either an admin or a manager/creator who can be granted ownership of content on an item-by-item basis.

💡 Tip: If you want multiple users to answer Ask the Expert questions, try this workaround. Create a new user account with a group email address such as lessonlytraining@lessonly.com, then make this user a lesson expert. Now any user with access to the group email can answer Ask the Expert questions.

When lessons have designated experts, learners will see an Ask button in the upper right corner of each page.

Selecting this button will open a free-text form that learners can use to submit the questions or feedback. Learners can select the Ask button at any time during a lesson.

After selecting the "Ask" button, the user is prompted to fill in their question, and the module shows who their question is being sent to. When users submit requests to the expert, these notifications are sent via email.

Designated experts receive feedback via email, enabling them to answer learners directly. The email subject line reads "Question for" followed by the title of the lesson in question.

Ask the Expert feedback cannot be addressed inside the Lessonly app. Experts always receive such feedback externally.

💡 Tip: If Ask the Expert emails are running afoul of spam filters, try some of the troubleshooting techniques in this article on ensuring email deliverability.

Micro-feedback complements Lessonly's Ask the Expert feature. It allows learners to highlight text in a lesson, couple that text with a question or comment, and send the feedback to a designated subject matter expert. Note that an expert must be designated on the lesson overview page for this feature to work.

Experts receive micro-feedback via email, allowing them to answer questioners directly.

💡 Important Note: Micro-feedback does not work on mobile devices.

Whereas lesson-level experts possess specialized knowledge of a given set of subjects or practices, account experts are generalists with expertise that spans the contents of an entire Lessonly tenant. You can improve the effectiveness of your content by appointing a such a point person, someone to whom learners can send any and all suggestions or questions, unbounded by subject.

To appoint an account expert, navigate to the Settings page, located in the admin (or cog icon) menu. Select the Global Lesson Settings tab, then locate the Account Expert setting at the bottom of the page. Enter the name of the expert you wish to appoint; Lessonly's typeahead functionality will suggest user names as you type.

💡 Important Note: Setting an account expert does not override or replace people previously designated as lesson experts.

The account expert feature can be located by all users on the Learn tab under the search bar.

When selecting "Send us a message," a module populates prompting the user to input their question and showing who the question is sent to.

Once the account expert receives a user's question, all further communication needs to be handled externally.

When account experts are archived, their expert status is not automatically disabled. Instead, you must return to the Global Lesson Settings menu and delete the account expert. For example, suppose you make Nathan an account expert, but then Nathan leaves the company, so his account is archived. Unless you remove Nathan as the account expert, his name will continue to appear in the 'Send us a message' module on the Learn page. It will even appear as though Nathan can still receive feedback when in fact he can't.

If you want to know how many 'Ask the Expert' interactions were recorded during the previous calendar month, download the All Activities Report, located on the Insights tab under More Reports. Select 'Email Download Link' and a link to download a .csv copy of the report will be sent to your inbox.