One of the main benefits of online learning is the vast amount of resources available to learn new topics and skills. But with so many options to choose from, how can companies ensure that their employees are getting access to the right kind of learning materials that will benefit their jobs and improve their skills?
That’s where learning paths come in. Learning paths provide an easy way to acquire skills by defining a clear trajectory on the content learners should take to learn a new topic. A learning path is usually made of goals, where each goal represents a course that learners must take.
Learning paths have the advantage of making it easy to deliver personalized content to learners and outlining a sequence towards mastering certain concepts. For example, if you want your employees to master selling banking products, the learning path they would take could be something like this:
Selling banking products:
- Introduction to selling banking products
- Types of banking products
- Advanced selling techniques for banking products
This is typically how learning paths are built. They have a series of courses with gradual difficulty levels, intended to lead the learner step by step towards its goals.
While this type of learning path can be beneficial for helping learners gain and improve skills, there are ways in which paths could be enhanced to provide a more engaging and personalized experience for learners.
How to create highly personalized learning paths for your employees
Let’s look at some of the tools that could be used to create highly personalized learning paths for learners:
Automation
Automation enables instructors to have a lot of flexibility when building learning paths and reduces their workload by replacing many manual processes. There are learning platforms where you can use automation for paths, thus allowing instructors to define actions that should be triggered when certain conditions are met.
For example, you can define a rule that when a new employee from HR joins the company, to automatically enroll them in an onboarding path and also add them to the company HR group. Another practical use of automation for paths is to automatically award certificates of completion when learners finish paths.
Read more: Specific techniques for designing asynchronous training
Gamification
Adult learners enjoy games as much as kids do, so why not include some gamification elements into your learning paths? You can create a game for each learning path, then award points and badges when learners complete a goal in the path.
Gamification will make going through the content in learning paths a more engaging experience, as learners advance from one goal to another. To motivate them even more, you can display a leaderboard with all the players, so learners can always see their ranking in the game. You can also split learners into groups and create team games for an added competitive element.
Read more: 10 Gamification pitfalls to avoid when designing online training
Dynamic flows
As previously mentioned, traditional learning paths are usually a selection of courses. Still, many other types of content could be added in a learning path to create more dynamic flows. Instead of having just courses as goals, you could also have quizzes, videos, certificates, etc.
For example, you could start a path with a video, then require the learner to complete a course, and then follow with a quiz that tests their knowledge. You can also add a certificate as one of the goals, allowing learners to complete the goal by finishing any of the available courses that award the certificate.
Artificial intelligence
Using the power of AI is one of the best ways to build highly personalized learning paths. While this is still a new concept in e-learning, there are already learning platforms that are looking to release AI-infused learning paths very soon.
For example, if someone has a goal to learn Graphic Design, an intelligent learning platform would first perform a skills gap analysis to identify the current level of this skill, then provide recommendations on what the learner needs to learn. The recommendations can be a variety of content types, such as watching a video on how to use a design tool, taking a beginner course, joining a graphic designer group, and more.
Read more: Why LMSs will soon have LXP functionality
Closing thoughts
These are some of the ways in which learning paths could be enhanced to deliver more personalized learning paths and improve learners’ experience so that they’re more motivated to go through the paths and achieve their goals. The first step, of course, is to find a learning platform to build the paths and then start adding some of these elements to make them more interactive, choosing the ones that will work best for your learner audience.
