Adaptive Learning: Changing the Channel
Nothing Has Changed
“You kids don’t know how good you have it these days.” It’s a phrase my dad would exclaim to me as I closed the door to my room, Sony Discman CD Player (with advanced ESP electronic skip protection technology) in hand. My dad would then drone on about record players and 8 track tapes. I’m not sure exactly what he said, because I had drowned out his voice with the quick press of a couple of buttons, selecting the exact song I felt like rocking out to.
Now, 30 years later, it seems that nothing has changed.
“You kids don’t know how good you have it these days,” I shout in the direction of two sets of rolling eyeballs. “When I was your age, cartoons, were only on TV one day a week. Saturday mornings. They were called ‘Saturday Morning Cartoons, and I had to get up early enough to watch those cartoons if I missed an episode, I didn’t get to watch that episode again until the summer when they would re-run the episode. IF I was lucky.”
“We know Dad.” my children reply as I walked out of the living room. “And don’t get me started on commercial breaks either!” People have grown accustomed to choose what media and information they consume when and where they wish to consume it. I’m not revealing anything new here, it’s been this way for many, many years. The radio can be nice at times, but we are conditioned to control; find ourselves more engaged, we become active listeners when we get to choose what we want to listen to, and when we want to listen to it--hello cloud-based playlist.
Everything Has Changed
We live and work in a world where seemingly anything and everything is available at all times we’ve trained ourselves to seek out music, movies, television, and even news specifically tailored to our wants and needs. We can identify immediately and perhaps even subconsciously whether a particular piece of media or content will be worth our time.
It is in this world that learning content finds itself competing for our time and attention. Adaptive Learning steps up to the plate by employing many of the same techniques that most, if not all of the popular streaming and social media platforms utilize to grab a user’s attention and keep it. As learning content creators, we can employ the benefits of algorithmic assistance to better tailor our content to our learners. By utilizing analytics data gathered from our learners, we can better understand the types of content they will likely engage with. We can offer suggestions and relate content together dynamically to encourage learners to explore deeper. If a learner is often engaging with the newest content, we can highlight and elevate that content; if a user prefers rich media (audio, videos, etc), we can also bring that forward.
Adapt to your Users and Harness this Change
A key advantage of an adaptive learning model is that it allows learning content creators to adjust to the learner as opposed to the opposite which is to require the learner to do the “heavy lifting” of adjusting their habits and learning preferences to the content. “User Retention” is a common subject of discussion among content creators and it can indeed be a challenge to grab and keep a user’s attention. It’s simple; if Users see no value in an app, they are likely to close it, promptly forget about it, and never come back.
As content creators, we should view this abandonment as the start of a conversation between our learners and us. By examining analytics, we can. By examining analytics, we can conclusions why users are leaving, and how we can adjust our adaptive model to address these abandonments.
Are learners quickly moving through a lot of content? Perhaps users are having a hard time finding anything that speaks to them. Try presenting popular content first as this content has the widest appeal across the broadest range of users. Are learners utilizing search functionality frequently? They might be looking for something specific. Try grouping content into easy to discern categories and presenting those categories in an easy-to-discover location. Are learners often exploring the app for content surrounding a single topic? Try offering links to related content at the end of each article to allow users an easy way to move through content.
Data is Your Guide to Empower Your Choices
You can tweak your app constantly, but none of it works well without strong, smart analytics data to go along with adaptive tools.
The pathways and engagement patterns surface through an adaptive learning platform usage and can then inform you as the content manager and curator on what is working, and what needs some tuning.
This can create a glide path for more effective use of your subject matter experts, better focus on learning content creation for your entire organization and optimizing the time spent by everyone that touches or interacts with the system.
What Adaptive Learning Can Get Wrong
It’s not always sunshine and rainbows with Adaptive Learning. It can be time consuming to develop and difficult to implement (at least initially). Designing the connections that weave learning content together can be a challenge; figuring out how to organize this interconnected content in a simple and clear manner is equally as difficult to do well.
Predictive models can sometimes be wrong which could completely throw a user out of an experience. Imagine a bundle of content all related around preparing the perfect spaghetti dinner. You’ve got articles about picking the right pasta, videos on preparing the sauce, tips on how and when to use an Italian sausage vs. traditional beef, and mixed into all of that is an article on Italian wars of the 15th century. It’s an extreme example certainly, but you can see how this can effect learner’s.
How You Can Take Control
Revisiting your tools, your platform and your content is vital in moving towards an adaptive learning approach for your organization. Your software for creating learning may support better practices for content structure and chunking, deep linking and searching, but unless it’s been getting regular updates and you have kept your licenses up-to-date, you may need a new tool to create content. Many newer learning platforms have some support for adaptive learning paths, but traditional Learning Management Systems (LMS) have lagged in this department. As far as content goes - it's important to recognize that with adaptive learning paths, not all of the content you create may be seen by every user, and that's OK.
It is us that must lead the change if we are planning on reshaping the audience’s experience. After all, what good is it to drone on about Saturday Morning Cartoons when everyone is watching streaming shows on Netflix or Hulu or wherever they might want to. It’s time to change the channel.
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