four Methods Automated Schooling Is Elevating eLearning
How automation will change education in 2021
eLearning is a powerful tool to help employees acquire the skills they need, especially when circumstances change and require new knowledge. Applying automation to eLearning initiatives can help them be even more effective. Here are 4 advantages of this approach.
1. Help employers monitor progress
When corporate officials train large segments of the workforce, it is not always easy to ensure that all employees complete the course on time. Managers can set deadlines, but how can they see if employees are processing the content by those deadlines? Automation can help.
One possibility is to give employees and employers appropriate push notifications. Perhaps a HR manager gets one that says, “Only 25% of people who have access to a course have started it by now.” If so, they could investigate further and speak to people who haven’t gone through many modules.
Automated elements can also detect changes in an employee’s typical usage and send encouraging notifications when necessary. Perhaps a person had logged in 14 evenings in a row to complete parts of a module, but then three days without activity. An automated prompt sent to someone’s smartphone could get them back on track after this time.
2. Personalization of content for engagement
Automation also plays an important role in customizing the learning experience for each student. People learn differently, and things like their existing knowledge, a learning disability, and their preferred way of getting information on new topics can affect their performance in a particular module.
Mousumi Kapoor is the founder and CEO of Continual Engine, a company that uses artificial intelligence (AI) to make learning easier for people in the workforce and elsewhere. Kapoor stated, “AI algorithms and predictive models work together to create highly personalized learning experiences and provide data to track and analyze the effects of learning.”
She went on to explain why such offers are becoming increasingly popular: “AI-driven learning solutions are revolutionizing the market by providing educational institutions or companies with an intuitive, highly personalized learning platform at their own pace and enabling feedback and data-driven metrics to measure course effectiveness.”
AI could also be useful for onboarding employees, especially by measuring their current level of knowledge. If the strengths and weaknesses of a person are automatically recorded while going through the modules, the content can remain as relevant as possible.
Consider an example where a person working through a section of an online chapter got all of the last 10 practice questions correctly. Then automated technology can detect a person’s competency and give them the opportunity to take the final quiz of the section. If a person can skip but still get the correct answers to all of these last few questions, they won’t get bored or come to terms with it by going through the content they know well.
3. Measure people’s learning preferences and behavior
The ability to accommodate various planning needs is one reason why individuals like online tutoring and study services. It doesn’t always work for someone to take part in personal trainings or tutoring at certain times from week to week. eLearning courses work similarly by allowing participants to complete modules at the times and in the locations that are convenient for them.
Automation can also help employers track trends related to how their employees prefer to go through the content. Perhaps an automated data analysis tool tied to a training program shows that most people edit materials online between 8pm and 10pm on weekdays. This can prove to be a useful tidbit if an employer is about to have in-person training as it shows the times when many workers are most available.
Since most of the automated functions run in the background, they can also collect valuable data on how most people interact with the course. For example, an automated reporting system could show that 98% of learners watch videos when modules contain them. Such a finding is a compelling reason for employers to keep adding videos to future content.
4. Adaptation to inevitable differences in content
To be successful with eLearning, one often needs to see the value of an individualized approach. For example, a business executive might require employees to go through a cybersecurity awareness module on phishing. Perhaps the company has experienced several phishing attacks of some kind and would like training to prepare people to identify and combat them.
There are products that automatically change where and how people interact with phishing simulations. Then people get content that is more like what they would see in the real world.
In addition, automation can track how people react differently to certain simulations based on the language they speak or their cultural background. This is important to know as certain phishing trends are more pronounced in some regions.
Automation and eLearning: an intelligent combination
These are some of the many reasons eLearning tools incorporate automated elements to make them work better for everyone involved. These and other benefits people should expect when they choose automated educational strategies.
