How Personalised eLearning Engages Learners – Featuring A Case Study

Learners today have specific needs. Contrary to the “one size fits all” approach, personalised eLearning engages learners as it provides to them a far more immersive and meaningful learning experience. This article highlights the key aspects of personalised learning along with a case study that highlights its impact.

Why Personalised eLearning Engages Learners

Personalised eLearning is customization of eLearning to meet specific needs of learners. It is typically done in the following ways:

Avatar-based selection followed by customised elements like themes, fonts, backgrounds, and so on.
Customization in the format of content delivery (for instance, options to use audio/video or otherwise, a degree of interaction, and so on).
Customization at the learning path level (for instance, a pre-assessment can help us understand the baseline proficiency and the learner can be given a personalized learning track that corresponds to the competency gaps. Alternately, we can use a survey to assess where learners’ interests lie and then offer a personalized set of recommendations regarding how to “consume” this module [which parts of it could be skipped and which should be taken with special attention]).

What Are The Key Benefits Of Personalization?

Personalisation of eLearning empowers learners to select what they want to learn, how they want to learn, and how much time they would like to spend on it. Being more focused (particularly, through the control on picking the right learning path), they get exactly what they need.

From an Instructional Design perspective, personalization of eLearning offers an approach that is far superior to traditional eLearning. Instructional Designers can craft learning designs that offer tremendous control to learners.

Specifically, through personalised eLearning, they enable learners to:

Set their own goals.
Set manageable milestones.
Select their own learning path.
Select the device they wish to learn on.
Take the learning at their own pace.
Select the kind of interaction levels they feel is relevant for them.
Get personalised feedback and use it to assess their progress.
Use the offered recommendations to enrich the learning path.

Besides Providing A Customized Learning Experience, Can Personalised eLearning Offer Other Benefits?

Absolutely! You can use the personalised eLearning approach to promoting a culture of learning as a continuum. You can additionally:

Integrate content curation and continuously enhance the online resources.
Add a “community of learning” approach to enhance collaboration between learners and with experts. Essentially, you can provide learners with a platform to interact with their peers and online experts on a regular basis.

All these approaches will help you see better learner commitment, higher completion rates, and better results.

What Are The Approaches To Offer Personalised Learning?

Over the last two years, we have been increasingly focusing on crafting learning designs that offer control to learners. Essentially, we want to create learning experiences wherein learners can “pull” what they want rather than be “pushed” into a prescriptive learning journey.

We have created various approaches to offer personalized eLearning that map to the following 4 levels:

Level 1: This is the most basic level of customization that offers personalization of Learning. It includes:

Using the name of the learner in the course (welcome, in the feedback, when learning a level, and so on).
Selection of fonts, colour schemes, and so on.
Avatar based selection.
Offering themes at the beginning of the eLearning course.

Level 2: This is the next level of customization that offers personalised learning. It includes:

Usage of Pre-Test and use of the proficiency level to offer a particular sequence of learning.

Level 3: Unlike level 2, where the control is still not fully with the learners, at this level we use the following techniques to empower the learners:

Usage of surveys at the beginning of the course to determine the learners’ interest as well as their own estimate of what they know.
In conjunction, we use the formative feedback of the interim Check Your Understanding questions to re-direct the learners. This aspect is crucial to balance the learning path in case the learners had opted out of certain sections but their performance in knowledge checks clearly points otherwise.
Additionally, we share a survey to determine the interests of the learner (including their won assessment of the proficiency levels). We use the cues from surveys to provide personalized, recommended learning elements.

Level 4: We designate this as the fourth level as it involves creating multiple variants of the learning elements that provide flexibility to learners to learn through a learning experience that is most relevant and engaging. Typical choices would include:

With or without audio.
With or without videos (only text based).
Microlearning nuggets instead of lengthy eLearning courses and supporting information as downloadable resources.
Courses with varying levels of interaction (Level 1/2/3).
Understanding of browsing patterns in topics and recommending learning elements that will provide greater proficiency.

Summary

Personalised eLearning addresses one of the most significant expectations that learners have, that is, to have full control on what they want to learn and how they want to learn. This strategy enables us to align the solution closely to learners’ interest and learning style and helps them achieve the required level of cognition.

I hope this article provides the required insights on why it makes business sense to adopt personalised eLearning and the case study helps you assess the impact it will create. =