How to Enhance eLearning with Personalization

How to enhance eLearning with personalization

Have you ever received a generic insert-your-name-here piece email? A letter addressed to “Dear Homeowner”? Did you continue reading, or did you junk the missive without giving it any more thought?

Consider now how a learner may lose interest in an online course when they’re met with a boiler plate eLearning program. It’s hard to get excited about something that seems like it was built without any consideration of who you are and what you, as a learner, might need. What can you do to give your courses that personal touch they may be missing?

Enter personalization. It offers a way to customize the learning environment that considers a learner’s unique needs, preferences, and style of learning. It gives the learner some control over their learning environment, enables them to set their own goals, learn at a pace that works for them, and manage and customize their learning path.

Key features of personalization

Using personalization in your eLearning program can encourage higher engagement, improve knowledge retention, and foster a sense of autonomy within the learner. Let’s look at some key features of personalization that can make all of that possible:

Profiles – Learners fill out profile information about their background, goals, and preferences. This data then helps guide content selection and delivery. By having the learner set their own goals, it puts them in charge of their learning.

Learning paths – Individualized learning paths are created based on a learner’s preferences, knowledge, and goals. These paths will also be influenced by the learner’s progress in the course, the areas they are competent in, as well as any knowledge gaps that exist. This means the learner can skip over content that they already know and focus on what’s most relevant to them, which can improve their engagement.

Feedback – Personalized learning offers learners instant feedback on their progress, which can help refine the areas that a learner needs to improve on. This keeps the learner interested in the course material and can enhance their knowledge retention.

Adaptive content – Using the information that the learner provides, as well as data analytics from the learner’s progress and success rates, content can be adjusted to match the learner’s pace and learning style, making it more appealing and keeping the learner motivated to stick with it. We enjoy apps with constantly evolving algorithms that consider our shopping habits and interest in music, movies, and TV shows, so wouldn’t it be nice if our learning programs were similar?

How to implement personalization in your eLearning course

The following are some specific ways that you can use personalization to enhance your eLearning courses:

1. Scenarios

Interactive elements, specifically, longer choose-your-own-adventure-style scenarios (also known as branching scenarios) can create an immersive experience for the learner. It’s an opportunity to relate the content to a real-life situation that can put the course material in context for the learner and deepen their understanding of it. At each stage, the learner will decide what the best response to a given scenario is, getting to know the impact or potential consequences of each of their choices.

2. Role Selector

This is an effective option for corporate learners and when implementing onboarding training. During the set-up process, learners select their role and get a personalized learning path based on what their job position is. This ensures that only relevant learning activities are present for the learner to complete.

3. Multimedia

Learners have different preferences when it comes to the format that information is presented in. Some prefer downloadable PDFs or job aids, while others are more visual learners that require images, audio, or video components. It’s necessary to provide a variety of media options that cater to all types of learning styles.

Curious to learn more about developing your own eLearning course? Download our latest eBook now to uncover the secrets behind optimizing competency-based learning to support and inspire your learners.

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