The Benefits Of Personalized Learning Content
From movies and music playlists to the online shopping basket, we’re used to providers personalizing what they offer to us according to our likes, dislikes, and past behaviors. One size no longer fits all in the consumer world—so why should our eLearning take a fixed approach?
Personalization in eLearning creates better learner engagement, reduces seat time (saving organizations money), and improves performance—sounds like a bit of a no-brainer, right?
Here, we’ll explore 4 key benefits of personalizing your eLearning—for your learners and your organization.
The 4 Benefits Of Personalized Learning Content
The goal of your learning is always to improve employee and organizational performance—but what if you could reduce seat time at the same time, too?
Personalized learning allows you to build easily deployed, scalable, and contextualized learning experiences for any workforce scenario, with 4 key benefits.
1. Saves Time
Personalized eLearning reduces the time a learner spends in training by removing content that isn’t relevant. When learners spend less time going through the content they already know, we increase their speed to proficiency and reduce the training time and the associated costs. For example, by saving 10 minutes per 500 learners, you could save over 83 hours of learning time in total. No small amount.
2. Increases Engagement
A learner is more likely to interact with and remember content that targets their current role, their projects, or their area of work. When information is relevant and useful, a learner is more likely to pay attention to and interact with the experience on offer. If content is king, context is the castle, and if it’s not relevant to the learner and their job, then they may not engage, and the opportunity to learn will be wasted.
3. Increases Motivation
An engaged learner is also likely to be a more motivated one, as they can connect learning to their own experiences. We can further increase motivation by acknowledging the fact that we all like to learn differently. Providing choice allows learners to become actively involved in the Learning and Development process—removing barriers to training and increasing motivation.
4. Improves Knowledge Retention
We’ve seen that content which is presented in a relevant context improves the learner’s motivation and engagement. It also improves the recall and retention of this knowledge over time. This is made possible because the context makes it easier for learners to draw mental connections, deepen their understanding, and transfer knowledge back to the job—where it really matters.
So, as you can see, these 4 benefits drive the best outcomes for your business by creating learning that is effective, efficient, relevant, and agile. So, why have organizations not embraced personalized learning more broadly?
One of the main reasons is that we tend to focus on content and not users. Personalization requires a user-first lens to learning design, and once we understand our learners, there are a number of approaches to creating a more personalized learning experience.
We use four proven personalization techniques to adapt and customize learning for each individual.
So, how can you maximize gain in minimum time? Here are a few of the techniques you can deploy:
- Role selector – Give learners personalized learning pathways based on their role. At the beginning of a course, learners can select their role, or this data can be inherited from the LMS or other systems.
- Pre-assessment/diagnostic – Give learners the opportunity to test out at the beginning, then offer the same assessment at the end for those who did not pass.
- Branching scenarios – Give learners an optimal pathway with assessment points on the way and provide supportive tutorials if needed to bridge knowledge gaps.
- Scorecards – Scorecards allow learners, via trial and error, to see the impact of a series of choices on a whole host of differing variables.
Without using these techniques, your learning can feel siloed, out of touch, and irrelevant to your employees. The result: uninspired learners who don’t develop into the high-performing employees you need.
Using these four techniques, you can create learning that feels connected, personal, and relevant, improving attention and ultimately improving learner and organizational performance.
Shaping The Future Of Learning
Kineo helps the world’s leading businesses improve performance through learning and technology. We’re proud of our reputation for being flexible and innovative, and of our award-winning work with clients across the world.
Kineo
Kineo helps the world’s leading businesses improve performance through learning and technology. We combine quality in learning with award-winning customer service and innovation. We’re here to take on your learning and performance challenges – and deliver results.
Originally published at kineo.com.
