Personalisation & Learning Pathways in Digital Learning Design
What is Personalisation?
Personalised Learning (PL) design trends results in tailored online experiences for individual learners, allowing for the customisation of learning to their specific goals & needs. Students manage their own learning, communicating with the educator regarding what, how and when they want to learn. (Pane et al., 2017)
Modern learning platforms cater for PL experiences, allowing learning professionals to design and develop personalised learning while incorporating feedback from students.
Personalisation Techniques
Learning platforms can be personalised to each learner in the following ways:
- Gamification features- rewarding learners for progress or completion of modules
- Sending targeted nudges to individual learners based on their progress
- Ensuring accessibility & responsiveness- If students can access their learning materials on a variety of devices, it creates a more personalised digital learning experience
- Unique learning pathways- recommended courses to learners based on their personalised needs and preferences.
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Learning Pathways
Learning pathways are a predefined selection of courses that are organised into one path for learners, usually based on recommended knowledge and skills for a specific domain or role. Furthermore, it can be linked to career pathways in an organisation. Learners can also curate their own pathways through adaptive learning techniques.
How To Create Learning Pathways
- Breakdown core skills & competencies of the individual learner
- Curate/ create a set of courses and learning content to address these skills
- Define the learning pathway for the learner by the means of strong LXD
- Set up the learning pathway in the learning platform
- Create steps, milestones, check in points and feedback opportunities for the learner
- Allow the learner to track progress and reward completion of elements of the path
- Continuously update your learning path with new content & courses
Benefits of Personalised Learning Pathways
- Learning paths provide visibility to the learner on how they can improve their skills over a period and what the journey will look like.
- Learning paths provide structure to the rollout of learning in your organisation.
- There is less reactive design of courses, and it can save on admin time within the LMS (Learning Management System)
- The more flexibility and adaptive the learning path, the more personalised it will become. This will drive higher levels of engagement.
- Consider UDL and UXDL when designing the paths in your platform.
Considerations When Creating Personalised Learning Pathways
It should be noted that implementation of PL can take time as learning professionals have to factor in learning plans, tracking learners’ capabilities, and ensuring that students complete the required learning outcomes. Attention to UDL and UXDL guidelines must also be kept in mind to ensure equal learning experiences when designing personalised learning pathways.
Impact of Personalisation on Digital Learning
Personalised Learning as a design trend is continuously evolving consequently, improving the learner’s ability to meet learning outcomes irrespective of their skill level. This may lead to the need for more versatile and engaging content to be created and curated by digital learning professionals.
The Next Step
The EdTech industry is constantly evolving, and new design trends are becoming popularised every day. With our university credit-rated programmes in Digital Learning Design and Instructional Design, you can start or advance your career as a specialist in digital learning design.
We are running our next free Virtual Open Day on 15th March, where we will present our Professional Diploma in Digital Learning Design to anyone interested in upskilling or starting a career in Digital Learning. Click here to register.
References
- Spiske, S. (2019). Personalized learning: focusing on individuality | DMEXCO
- Pane, J.F., Steiner, E.D., Baird, M.D., Hamilton, L.S., & Pane, J.D., (2017). How Does Personalized Learning Affect Student Achievement? | RAND
- Watkins, C., (2012). Personalisation and the Classroom Context. In M.E. Mincu (Ed.), Personalisation of Education in Contexts (page 13). Rotterdam/Boston/Taipei: Sense Publishers