The Benefits Of Understanding Learner Behavior
If we could understand the behavior of learners as they work through online training material, it would certainly make life easier in Learning and Development. We would be able to accelerate the learning curve by providing learners with content that’s an exact match for their needs.
It’s common to look to your Learning Management System (LMS) to work out learner behavior, and this is often disappointing. You will certainly know when each learner logged in, their visit history, and you can see a record of completed courses, but this won’t help you understand their individual path through the content. It’s also limited to content from within your LMS.
So how can we deliver more engaging, personalized learning experiences? Let’s consider a few key topics.
Employee Engagement And Retention
When your learners have some control over the learning they consume, they are likely to be more interested. And when your learners define their own learning journey, it also helps them retain the material.
For this to work, you need to understand what each learner requires and when. If we have this information, we can build a learning programme that takes the best content, from anywhere in the digital realm and makes it available exactly when it’s needed.
And this is where tracking analytics comes in.
Understanding Learner Behavior
You need accurate tracking that tells you how employees are interacting with your training material, because if you don’t know what the learner doesn’t know, you can’t personalize the experience for them. Thankfully, however, technology is now available that records every step of the learning journey.
By using this information, you might notice that a good number of your learners keep returning to the same piece of content. This could be a good thing and they are revisiting it because they find it really informative. But it might be that your learners don’t really understand the content and are taking several attempts to digest the material. Or, if it’s an assessment, it might be that they need to answer the same question a few times to reach the pass mark.
Being able to distinguish between these events by having this information is your starting point towards creating a personalised learning journey, in the same way that having analytics software on your website can help you understand what your customers need and change your content to match.
Tracking In Practice
In the retail world, Amazon are using behavior tracking really well: The more someone buys from them, the clearer the picture of what that person likes, which means Amazon can offer personalized suggestions. Sometimes this isn’t a good thing!
However, in a learning context, offering your learners a personalised learning journey, where you can adapt their learning to provide them with recommendations of relevant content, based on what they have already consumed and what they need to do to meet the business goals, is very much the way things should be.
Improving Learning Materials With Data
Trying to get all your separate Learning and Development systems to talk to each other and share information between them, to get the data you need, can prove to be quite a challenge. Using behavior tracking is a good way round this.
Using a Learning Record Store (LRS) you can create high-level dashboards and in-depth reports on each learning journey so that, over time, you’ll start to see patterns and easily spot what’s working and where you need to make changes to improve your learning programme. You’ll know whether you need to adjust your own content, or whether you should consider looking for external content, to give your employees the skills and knowledge they need to succeed in their role and ultimately contribute to your organization’s success.
