How to personalize learning in your online course?

Not sure how to personalize learning in your academy? Worried about the high cost of personalization? Then this post might just be what you are looking for.

Personalization of your course is a double-edged sword. On one hand, it will improve the course completion rate of your students. On the other hand, personalizing your course for each and every student in your academy will take a lot of time. This is true especially when you have a large community of students.

If you don’t have enough time or resources, you simply cannot create different content for every student. But there are several ways and tools to give a personalized touch to your courses without spending a lot of time on them. 

This post is all about how to personalize learning in your courses with minimal effort. Read on.

What is Personalized Learning?

As the name suggests, personalized learning is an e-learning technique that is designed to closely meet every learner’s preferences and interests. Incorporating personalized learning into your course gives a sense of comfort to your students as they will be able to comprehend the lessons better. This will serve as an important motivation factor towards completing a course. Personalizing learning basically helps to improve a student’s approach towards a course and also helps them to learn at their own pace.

Benefits of offering a personalized course

Before we look into how to personalize learning, it is important to look into its benefits. Personalization offers a wide array of benefits to both the learners as well as the tutors. Let us have a look at some of them – 

Higher engagement

Creating a learner-centric course helps to engage your learners more toward your course. It also makes them feel valued as they think you have spent a lot of time and effort to curate the content that is specific for them. Students also tend to learn the concepts at a faster rate and the retention level is also higher.

Reduces course completion time

A high course completion time is bad for a tutor. It either means your topics are too complex for the students to understand or the students simply are not interested in completing the course. This is where personalization can help. Personalizing your course exactly as per the learner’s requirements and skills drastically reduces the course completion time as they are keener to learn about the concepts since it suits their needs and abilities.

Higher ROI

Creating a personalized course can attract a lot of students to your course. Due to lower completion time and better engagement, more and more students complete the courses quickly. They in turn will share the course completion certificate on social media. Or talk about your course to their friends and relatives. This means without spending any money on your marketing, you are drawing students’ attention. As a result, personalization garners high ROI.

Completely application-based

As a tutor, your course is successful if it can instill confidence in the learner’s mind to handle a real-life situation. Personalized courses are your best bet to achieve this. Real-life scenarios and case studies are usually a core part of most personalized courses. It will make the students understand the problem faced and the solution employed by an actual entity.

How to personalize learning in your courses?

Here are some key techniques that you can follow to personalize your online course.

Create learner-centered goals

Since a course is built for the learners, it should be designed in such a way that its goals closely match the student’s requirements. The course objectives should be set in such a way that they are relevant to the student’s skill levels. Conduct thorough research and have a session with your students before starting to write down the learner’s goals.

Assess learners’ abilities

By conducting deep research and interacting with your prospective learners, you also understand what they need. As a tutor, your job is to create a course that can bridge the gap between their knowledge and the required skill. You can also use quantitative e-learning assessment tools to evaluate a learner’s skill level. This is to understand where they need help and personalize the course accordingly. 

Offer personalized feedback

Receiving timely and accurate feedback is one of the best ways for a student to learn faster. Especially if your course doesn’t involve a lot of interaction with the tutors, the learners can go wrong in multiple areas. In such cases, it becomes the responsibility of the tutor to offer personalized feedback and bring the learner back on track. Never give one-size-fits-all feedback to your students. No two students are alike.

Allow learners to choose the format of your course

Learners who are looking for personalized online courses may have varying requirements. For instance, one learner might be looking for video explanations of the topics while the other might be searching for audio podcasts or textual information. It is ideal if you could upload the course in all possible formats and let the learner choose the format of your course.

Set achievable milestones

Setting milestones is an integral part of an online course. In the case of a personalized course, it is better that you set milestones that are easily achievable and do not take a lot of time to reach. When course milestones are long and complex, learners tend to lose the enthusiasm to complete the course. 

Incorporate OERs for asynchronous learning

Personalized learning is an asynchronous mode of e-learning. To facilitate better asynchronicity, incorporate external learning resources to make them learn better. Open Educational Resources (OERs) are an excellent source of additional materials that the students can use to gain more knowledge.

Provide Continuous Support

Although personalized learning is more of self-learning, round-the-clock online support from your team does a world of good to the students. This ensures that all their queries and doubts are answered immediately. This means they never lose the enthusiasm to complete the course. If round-the-clock support is not possible, at least have an exhaustive FAQ section at the end of each module. 

The Role of technology in personalizing online courses

Now that you know to personalize learning in your course, it’s time to dive deeper and understand the role of technology in it. Technology has always been a close ally for every online tutor. Today, thanks to advancements in technology, instructors have access to various advanced technological tools to create and manage a personalized course. Here are two disruptive technologies that play a very important role in personalizing a course – 

LMS

Learning Management Systems have become an indispensable asset to most e-tutors. It helps to create and manage online courses effectively by adding a touch of personalization through various powerful features it comes with. 

For example, Learnyst is a popular LMS in India that has helped hundreds of tutors in the past to create personalized online courses and gather a large audience for them.  One important feature of Learnyst is the capability to create a course in any format –  audio, video, text, or a mixture of all three. This gives the freedom for users to pick the content type they like. 

Artificial Intelligence (AI)

This transformative technology is at its beginning stages in the e-learning field. Once established, AI can provide automatic suggestions for students to choose a course. Also, it will automatically shift the track of the course based on the learner’s skills and capabilities. It can completely eliminate the workload on teachers to manage the progress of the students in a personalized course. In addition, AI powered content tools can also help in creating personalized and adaptive learning materials based on the learner’s individual strengths, weaknesses and learning styles.

What’s Next?

If you are looking to create a personalized course for your academy, sign up with Learnyst today for a free 14-day trial.