One Size Won’t Fit All: The Future of Personalized Digital Learning

In June, I attendedThe eLearning Guild’s new FocusOn Learning Conference & Expo. There was oneparticular takeaway from the conference that I think we need to embrace more asan industry, and I want to share that thought with you. The thought is this: Whatif your digital learning could adapt, adjust, read, and assess the needs of eachof your “digital students,” then serve up a personalized course specific to eachof them based on their personal learning history? How cool would it be if wecould create a personalized learning experience for each student who takes ourcourses?

Personalizedlearning? What is that?

What do I meanby personalized learning? Imagine, if you will, that we are in a classroomtogether. I am the teacher and you are the student. You came to my class tolearn how to use a certain software program. Before the class, you decided thatyou wanted to review some tutorials and documents that would help you feelready to dive right into the content. But others in the class did differentthings to prepare, and some did not prepare at all, so each person is on adifferent level.

As the teacher,I prepared a lesson, but I wanted to make sure I would be ready for any type ofquestion that might come up. So I almost over-prepared to make sure I was knowledgeableenough about the tool and ready to answer any question about the software. Ithen organized a plan based on where I thought the class would go, but I also preparedfor other situations that might happen. So as a teacher, I am able to adapt andadjust my lesson depending on the learners’ needs and the questions that maycome up as I am teaching the class. But suppose that, during the class, youhave questions that are different than what I had planned.

Now, I can takeyour questions and respond in one of two different ways. I can ignore yourquestions and continue with my plan, or I can change my plan and spend sometime helping you understand some of the basics, and then adapt the rest of the contentas I go. If I am a good teacher, I will choose the second option. I would seethe students’ needs or identify their knowledge gaps and then do what I could tohelp fill those knowledge gaps. In that way, when I get back on schedule it willgo more smoothly than if I had tried to ignore those knowledge gaps and justpush the content I prepared.

For the mostpart, as “digital teachers” we tend to just push our content as the solution, a“one-size-fits-all” course, ignoring where users may be in their currentknowledge. In person, I am able to adapt, change, adjust, read, and assess thestudent needs in real time and change my approach based on what I learn about theindividual learners. Because of that, I can personalize my teaching to betterhelp everyone in the class.

So how do we dothat digitally? How do we adapt, adjust, read, and assess our digital students’needs to create a personalized experience in a digital format? Most currenteLearning tools only allow you to push content, creating a presentation withoutreally allowing for the customization and personalization that the users need. Yes,I know some allow you to collect the user’s name and then plug it in throughoutthe course. That is a good start, but I am talking about creating a completelydifferent course for each user.

Getting to know the user

So how do weget around that? Do we have to stop teaching digitally and move back to in- personcourses? No, of course not. How do we create digital learning that can adapt,adjust, process, and assess our learners’ needs? How do we create training thatcan get to know the users, identify their knowledge gaps, figure out what theyhave done and what they haven’t done, and then serve up instantly apersonalized digital course that best suits their needs?

One solution couldbe as simple as adding “get-to-know-you questions” at the very beginning of acourse. The responses would allow you to create logic on the fly for the course:which sections to serve up and which sections not to deliver. You could evenmodify the content based on user responses.

If you have notheard of Consensus (www.consens.us), youshould check it out. This application targets sales organizations, but I thinkthe concepts behind the approach could easily be applied to the learningsector. Instead of just asking prospects to click a button and watch aone-size-fits-all sales demo video, the technology first asks questions of the individual.Knowing what the person already knows and what they don’t know, what theirneeds are, and which features are of most interest to them, the applicationcreates a custom sales demo for each prospect. This demo shows longer sectionsof the video that target the prospect’s interest and shorter video snippets forfeatures the prospect cares about less.

Holy smokes! Canyou imagine doing that for learning? What if you gathered some user info beforea course to set up the logic and then programmatically adapted the course forthe user? It is not as personalized as a one-on-one discussion, but it getscloser than static one-size-fits-all learning.

Knowing how towrite some basic code could accomplish this. You could prompt the users withquestions, store their responses in some variables, and then programmaticallytake them down different paths based on those responses.

The xAPI—personal learninghistory

We have beenhearing about the xAPI (Experience API) for years now. We know that it allowsus to track data from any location and that we can get more detailed data thanwe ever could with SCORM. With the xAPI, we can assemble what are called “statements.”This allows us to track various learning activities, such as: Jeff Batt attended FocusOn LearningConference. This statement has three important elements—the actor (who itis: “Jeff Batt”), the verb (the action: “attended”), and then the object (nameof the thing the actor acted upon: “FocusOn Learning Conference”). Sending overthese statements allows us to start tracking learning history. Every time wesend a statement, that event is now stored in an LRS (learning record store),which gives us greater insights into what our learners are doing and how ourcontent is performing.

But probablythe most fascinating part is that it also gives us the ability toprogrammatically go into the LRS and, on the fly, see what a learner has done andhasn’t done, and use that data in whatever way we need to use it. Imagine: Witha learner’s history built over time in the LRS, we could create a personalized coursethat first goes into the LRS and asks the question, “What has the learneralready learned or experienced?” With the information that the LRS gives us, wecould adapt, change, adjust, read, and assess the student’s needs, and delivera different course based on their personal learning history. This is just like Iexplained in the first example (“Personalized learning? What is that?”), but nowwe don’t need to ask the users questions or ask them to fill anything out first—thecourse can obtain the information automatically, and in fact, it would havemore data to work with than it could get from a form.

Figure 1 is a schematicof the way this could work.

Figure 1: Schematic of xAPI support for personalized learning

This may seem “Big Brotherish,” but it is not far from whatis already being done on the web. How does Amazon know what I want? Facebookuses what it knows about you and your behaviors to deliver customized,personalized marketing ads for things you like. Target has also been doing thisfor years.

I have done some initial tests of this concept, and it lookspromising. I am excited to explore this use of the xAPI in more depth. Thisdoes call for creating courses in a different way and for becoming more user-centric.It forces thinking beyond static page-turners. It requires that we createcourses that can flex and adapt based on user data. This may seem hard, and wemay need to engage with web development teams and other talents outside thenormal learning teams, but this approach forces us in the right direction. Itis the path we need to take for digital learning.

So where can you start? The eLearning Guildoffers xAPI Camp pre-conference workshops at all of its live conferences (detailsof the next xAPI Camp are available on the DevLearn 2016 website). I think that would a great place to start, to dive in, and toreally get to know the xAPI. I see this as a way to stop just pushing ourcontent in a one-size-fits-all format and start creating personal experiences.What are your thoughts? Do you see eLearning going in this direction? Whatwould it take to do this? Please share your thoughts in the comments on thisarticle.