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Beyond One-Size-Fits-All: Unleashing the Power of Personalized Learning
Recently, we’ve been revealing our top tips for getting smarter about managing learning content.
This time, we’re focusing on the role personalization has to play in the learning content management process.
Usually when people think of content personalization strategies, they imagine having to wrangle dozens of versions of each asset, each tailored for a specific audience subset. But what if it didn’t have to be so hard? In fact, what if managing personalized content was virtually as straightforward as managing a single version of each resource?
If that sounds appealing, let’s dive right in!
The benefits of personalized learning content
When it comes to learning, there is no one-size-fits-all solution. Even the best course in the world won’t be right for every learner. Different people have different knowledge levels, format preferences, schedules and availability, speak different languages, and paces of learning.
Personalizing your learning content means you can tick more boxes for more learners. By adopting a content personalization strategy, whether that’s by format, language, delivery method, or something else entirely, you can better cater to each learner in your audience, giving you more learner engagement, and ultimately, better results.
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Where to start with your content personalization strategy
Before you jump straight into your content personalization strategy, make sure you really understand your audience. A learner survey will help you dig deeper into how people learn and what gets them motivated, as well as what will help you help them. You want to find out things like:
- What languages your learners speak
- What content formats they prefer
- What content length they prefer
- How much time they have for learning
- Whether there are any accessibility requirements
- What devices they use to learn
- When they learn
Once you have these answers, you can start pulling together a content personalization strategy that makes sense, and break it down into specific subgroups. Perhaps your programming team prefers quick knowledge base resources, but your sales team prefers simulations. Your compliance team may mandate that you deliver state or country-specific content, which may require certain boxes to be checked.
The key is to not assume you know what people want. The best personalization happens in line with your organizational goals, and based on real data and preferences, not just assuming that graphic designers will prefer visual resources, or that salespeople will learn best from face-to-face roleplaying.
So once you have your learner data, how can you start personalizing your content to meet their preferences?
Personalization without programming
We tend to think that content personalization strategies are a labor-intensive process. Think about tailored clothing vs off-the-rack fast fashion - personalization means creating something unique every time, for every customer, right? Well, not necessarily.
Let’s take onboarding as an example. While you could simply regurgitate your company policy for every new starter, building personalized scenarios helps bring your onboarding content to life with simple content personalizations such as selecting stock models wearing specific uniforms, location-specific backgrounds, or even your own real employees and work sites. Custom audio clips will only help to make the learning experience more immersive.
Leveraging branching scenarios helps create a personalized experience for every learner, as they feel like they have a choice in the way they interact with content, with enough personal touches to make it feel relevant, but not at the expense of efficiency.
Even better: with the dominKnow | ONE Scenario Builder, you can do all of this with no programming required.
Multilingual content for global organizations
For large, global organizations, or those located in diverse areas, it’s crucial that you provide content in learners’ native languages to get the best results. Learning content translation is often considered to be one of the trickiest aspects of personalization if you’re creating a new course for every language version. Every time an update is required, you’re back to tediously updating multiple courses. But there’s a better way.
A great example is dominKnow | ONE, which uses a single course for all common elements, and allows multiple languages to be loaded in and automagically loaded according to the learner role preferences. This leaves you with a single course to create and update as content changes.
Then, making your course multilingual becomes a simple three-step process:
- Templatize your course design to accommodate all languages, then select from 50 preloaded languages to automatically personalize the language based on learner preferences
- Export text for translation with any common translation system
- Import XML of translated text back into dominKnow | ONE and make any final content localizations
It really is that simple!
Many organizations avoid translating their content because they believe it’s too much of a time sink for too little payoff - which can easily be the case if you don’t have the right tools and processes in place, especially for large numbers of courses or assets.
But platforms like dominKnow | ONE even support right-to-left languages such as Arabic, Hebrew, Farsi, and Urdu, which many providers consider more complex, meaning you can quickly translate content for diverse global audiences from one place.
dominKnow has all the tools your team needs to create and distribute knowledge wherever and whenever it’s needed.
