Personalizing Your eLearning

Personalizing elearning is basically the tailoring of your elearning curriculum to fit with the needs and learning styles of individual learners. To elaborate on that, it gives the learner the chance to help decide how they are learning, what they are learning and when it is being learned. There are some key elements that go into personalizing elearning such as instructional approach, lessons and activities use a learner’s experience and interest to guide the learning path. Your organization should have the learning objectives already in place, and even prior to that it would be prudent to assess your learner’s knowledge gaps to gauge their current understanding of the content. Another factor to consider is your feedback. Instead of giving generalized feedback to everyone who takes your course, take some time to analyze your data and give personalized feedback as soon as possible.

The type of activities and multimedia is also something to consider, and which ones your learners prefer can be found out in the pre-assessment phase. Different people have different learning styles, which may require different learning tools for optimal retention. For example, some learners might respond better to more visual activities, videos, or webinars. On the other hand, some might prefer gamification or whiteboard animations. One tool isn’t necessarily better than the other, but they can be used in specific places in you elearning to attract more of a learners attention.

Some courses do require the navigation to be locked and for the learner to literally start on slide 1 and continue slide by slide to the end. Try opening the navigation and giving the learner some autonomy. Instead of “pushing” the content to learners, this approach allows them to “pull” the information. This let’s learners not waste their time on information that they perhaps already are familiar with or is not relevant to their role. Branching scenarios are a good way to achieve this as it can give the learner a choice of different routes to take at the very beginning of the module. Each learning path can include different learning tools and relevant topics that the learner has decided would be best for them.

Try this approach and see how personalizing your elearning helps engage your learners, so they can be in control of their learning and more motivated. The “one size fits all” approach doesn’t work for all topics and your audience shouldn’t have to sit through a module that won’t be of any use to them!

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