From whiskey barrels to shampoo, people love a customized experience.
When it comes to learning, it’s no different! Personalizing online learning has real benefits both for learners and for organizations. In customizing your content and courses, you’re empowering the learner and delivering a more dynamic and enjoyable learning experience. For your organization, a commitment to providing personalized content helps create a culture where continued learning and training are a core value.
Let’s take a look at the top five reasons why personalized learning content is so critical to the health of your organization and the career trajectory of your people.
Have you ever set a goal and achieved it? Most of us know what feels right for us, and by allowing us to select our own goals and the milestones to achieve it, we feel empowered and engaged. It’s the same for learning content – personalizing content puts learners in the driver’s seat.
It allows them to control their approach to the material and “pull” the knowledge they’re looking for, versus being “pushed” through a one-size-fits-all course.
Trends like microlearning and mobile learning are a great example of how content can be personalized for learners. These courses are organized into small chunks with a low time commitments (usually 5-7 minutes), and are often used on mobile devices, allowing users to learn wherever and whenever it works for them.
The same goes for more intensive courses. If a learner has more time at night or early in the morning to invest in learning, the content is there and ready for them.
From gamification to social learning, there are so many great ways for learners to interact with the material and each other. By personalizing the content for your learners, you’re giving them the power to choose how they interact both with the material itself and with other learners, deepening the impact of the material and encouraging additional learning.
Everyone who has experienced getting automated feedback from a support chatbot before speaking with a specialist knows that the personalized approach is normally far superior to the “did this answer your question?” canned responses.
Why? Personalized feedback makes a huge difference! It gives learners the ability to assess their own individual progress and follow recommendations that are pertinent to them to create new opportunities for learning and subject mastery. Take eLearning analytics, for example. Personalized analytics can offer a holistic view of how a learner performs and then help determine which learning materials are appropriate, useful, or relevant based upon that learner’s performance, skill level, and personal interests.
Ultimately, this is everything. Higher participation and completion rates are great for both learners and their organizations. In creating a personalized eLearning experience, you’re laying a foundation for a culture where learning is a continuum, not a box to be checked. Investing in customized content for your learners ensures that they will be motivated to continue to learn throughout their career, increasing participation and completion rates.
Sold on personalized eLearning content? We don’t blame you – we are, too! There are so many ways to achieve a personal touch in educational content, from using a learner’s name to letting them choose avatars, select their own milestones, chart their own course through material and more. It’s more enjoyable for the learner, is more impactful on knowledge retention, and is more effective for the organization. Sometimes, more is more.
