Adaptive Learning: what it is and how it can contribute to success

When approaching e-Learning education, it is very important to consider Adaptive Learning. For those who do not know the meaning of the term, let's clarify it together.

With Adaptive Learning we mean the set of techniques and methods used in education when we want to personalize it.

But how can you customize a training course? It is possible to do this through certain steps: analysis of competences, capabilities of understanding, individual aptitude and pre-set goals of a person who intends to go through the learning process.

Once these needs have been identified, you can design the e-Learning course that better satisfies the real requests in terms of user training.

Adaptive Learning is configured not only as a way to customize training, but also (in corporate applications) as a way to put every resource at the centre of the training, identifying and analysing his/her specific skills and understanding how to best use them in professional life.

Mr. Newman a scholar who published an article on Campus Technology, states that we must think of Adaptive Learning "as a new wide-ranging approach to corporate training, that can also englobe and develop the customization of a given training path". This means that we need to set individual goals for each Learner, providing them with the knowledge when it seems needed the most.

How to provide this type of personalized training?

There are various solutions: one of them consists of carrying out a sort of initial mini-test, always within the e-Learning platform, to identify the users' skills. Once the training is finished, the user will verify that his goals have been achieved by a final test.

The way in which the adaptive learning approach takes place is very important: when the test is finished, only the questions that have been answered incorrectly will be shown. Why this choice?
Simple: this way you can isolate the questions to which you have not been able to answer or for which you did not know the correct answers. This allows to reduce the time to devote to training and to eliminate the so-called "cognitive disorder" of users.

Adaptive Learning can be useful to the success of a company because the manager of corporate training can make a first check of the test results, and this will enablehim/her to identify the most suitable training course for each employee.

This way, you will optimize costs, because you will “launch” only the e-Learning courses needed to fill the specific gap that each employee shows in comparison to his/her peers.

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