How to train your customers and partners using adaptive learning experiences
Personalized learning is an effective approach to tailoring learning experiences to the level and abilities of each of your learners. It has powerful implications for large-scale enterprise learning programs like customer academies, partner training, and product education. Yet, it’s underutilized in these areas. This articles dives into the requirements necessary to make adaptive learning technology work for you, including tips on leveraging frameworks for adaptable content structure.
What is personalized learning?
In the classroom, personalized learning refers to a teacher tailoring their teaching method to the individual student based on their unique learning needs. This may mean adapting an assessment method from a written test to a hands-on activity, providing extra tutoring on a certain lesson, or providing more challenging problems to advanced students. In one study by Benjamin Bloom, this approach to personalized teaching showed students outperformed conventional students by 98%.
These personalized approaches are straight-forward in an in-person classroom, but what happens when we begin teaching students online, asynchronously? This is where adaptive learning, the AI-powered technology that makes personalized digital learning possible, enters.
By gathering data throughout the training process, adaptive learning technology optimizes training content. This means that each individual gets the content that matches their learning results,” states ELM Learning.
Imagine the impact of using adaptive learning to train partners, customers, and employees. This type of training, referred to as “customer education” or “extended enterprise learning,” typically involves teaching proprietary product and industry topics to a global audience, at scale. If personalized learning is effective in a small 20-student classroom, think of the benefit in personalizing training across such a large and diverse group of learners. Every one of your customers, partners, and employees is an individual with unique goals, prior experiences, and educational backgrounds. A personalized approach creates a higher quality experience for the learner and improves the likelihood of them reaching intended outcomes.
Requirements for true adaptive learning
Adaptive learning is not new. In fact, its origins trace back to the 1970s. Yet this technology has yet to be fully embraced in the enterprise learning space. Many of the leading learning management systems ( LMS ) today offer robust adaptive learning features, yet only a small percentage of LMS clients are successfully using them regularly in their online training programs. Why?
While education technology is one important half of adaptive learning, the other half involves the content itself. An LMS cannot truly serve up personalized learning if the content is not built and tagged to support it. (While generative AI is upping this entire game, the principles behind well-structured content remain. ) To explain this further, let’s break down what adaptive learning really is.
Any learning experience is just a matter of enabling an individual to get from where they are to where they need to be. Think of it as a path from point A to point Z. Your individual learners are not all starting from point A, though. Some are on point B, C, or M. And the actually path that some learners need to take through those points is different than others. So adaptive learning takes the entire A to Z curriculum and serves up the right content at the right time to each learner on their journey.
Two things are necessary for this to work:
1 Content must be structured in a modular way where lessons can be presented individually and yet still build toward a greater competency
2 Formative and summative assessments -even quick pulse checks - must be in place to check learner competence throughout the journey
Source: Every Learner Everywhere
How frameworks enable adaptive learning
Many LMS executives will agree that the reason their clients aren’t leveraging adaptive learning to the fullest is their content is not structured to support it. One possible cause for this is that the clients’ learning programs are not leveraging frameworks – meaning, they consist of many courses, paths, and lessons that aren’t intentionally tied together to enable specific learner outcomes and business goals. While some, or even many of the learning items may be categorized or tagged by topic, they are not necessarily tied to specific objectives leading to competencies.
If content is not well structured, adaptive learning features end up being utilized as a recommendation engine. “Because you told us you’re a sales leader, we recommend this sales content.” This is not personalized learning. If, however, learner data shows that this sales leader was advanced in many topics but just needed additional support in pricing negotiation, the LMS could deliver relevant lessons that cover those objectives to help the leader achieve their goals.
If you’re building your training program from the ground up, you can implement competency frameworks from day one. We recommend using the Backward Design model, which just means you begin with the end in mind.
“Backward Design” is an approach to creating curriculum, subjects, and even single class sessions that treats the goal of teaching as not merely “covering” a certain amount of content, but also facilitating student learning. Backward design prioritizes the intended learning outcomes instead of topics to be covered. ~ Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Every Learner Everywhere outlines 3 steps to this approach:
Identify desired results. What should learners know and be able to do at the end of the course? These are your learning outcomes.
Determine acceptable evidence that learners have achieved these learning outcomes. These are your formative and summative assessments.
Plan learning experiences, instruction, and resources that will help learners be able to provide evidence that they have met the learning outcomes.
When you’re using Backward Design at a program level, meaning the entire curriculum, you want to think broadly about your different learner segments and develop curriculum that scales, efficiently.
Implementing frameworks in existing programs
Not everyone has the benefit of starting from scratch. You may manage a program or academy that already has dozens if not hundreds of courses and learning assets. But it’s never too late to implement frameworks and begin leveraging adaptive learning. The process would be similar to those beginning a new program. First, utilize a measurement framework to establish the goal of the learning program, the audiences you’re training, the actions they need to take, and the competencies they need to successfully take the actions. From there, you’ll use instructional design principles to determine the outcomes and objectives that ladder up to build the competency.
Once you’ve mapped out this framework, you’ll tag your existing assets to align with the objectives. This exercise will likely uncover gaps where you’ll need to create assessments and additional content, and quite possibly show redundancies where you have many assets focusing on the same objective. It’s important to address these issues before leveraging adaptive learning technology, as ill-suited content could create a poor learning experience and backfire.
Get started with adaptive learning
Remember, whether you’re launching a brand new initiative or managing a long-standing, complex education program, it’s never a bad time to implement frameworks that will enable you to leverage your LMS’s adaptive learning features. And if you need it, we can help! The experts at Echtus have 20+ years of experience implementing frameworks that drive measurable results. Reach out for a free consultation to learn more.