How Is eLearning Like the Company T-shirt?

Answer: One Size Does NOT Fit All

No two learners are alike, yet far too often, corporate training treats all learners the same.

One-size-fits-all training might seem efficient — after all, you only have to create a single training module — but if you look at the details that matter, you find that putting all of your employees through the same training is like trying to get them all to wear the same size and style of T-shirt. 

For a few, the fit will be perfect. 

But for the majority, the fit will be all wrong. It might be too big — a course filled with information they don’t need or already know. It might be too small — a broad but shallow course that lacks crucial details they need to succeed at their work. Either way, you’re left with a product that’s inefficient and costly.

Adaptive training offers a superior solution. It’s like letting your employees order their T-shirts from a well-stocked online store with a really great personal-shopper chatbot. They end up with exactly what they need; each learner gets a T-shirt with the company colors and logo, but their T-shirts fit their differing sizes and styles. In the same way, adaptive learning delivers your content, tailored to ensure a perfect fit for each individual learner.

To understand why, let’s start by defining adaptive training and examining the pros and cons of comprehensive training administered to all learners. We’ll then compare that approach with an adaptive training approach.

Adaptive Training: More Than Personalization 

Many learning platforms offer some degree of “personalization,” but that doesn’t get around the one-size-fits-all problem because it doesn’t address the training content. Definitions of adaptive learning vary, but they focus on content and presentation. For example: 

• In a research paper, “Decoding Adaptive,” Pearson Learning and EdSurge define adaptive learning tools as “education technologies that can respond to a student’s interactions in real-time by automatically providing the student with individual support.”
• A Forbes article characterizes adaptive training tools as interactive “computer-based or online systems which modify the way material is presented.”

Our definition of adaptive training differentiates between adaptive and personalized learning. In brief, personalization is static while adaptive training is dynamic:

• Personalization accommodates learners’ preferences, offering a choice of media formats and letting learners choose how and where to consume learning. A bigger-picture take on personalization includes enabling learners to plan learning paths that reflect their job needs and career goals.
• Adaptive training describes a dynamic quality of the training content. An adaptive training platform delivers different content to each learner, based on the learner’s profile — learning goals, including mastery level — and the learner’s performance. This focuses each learner on content in areas where they are weak and on material in topics where they need to achieve a higher level of expertise.

The Allure — and Risk — of ‘One and Done’ eLearning

A single course

Creating a single comprehensive course has its appeal. You do it once, then you don’t have to think about it again. Or do you?

• Information changes, becomes outdated. Updating a large eLearning module is time-consuming and expensive; learners may use outdated or incomplete content for months between updates.
• In many industries, practitioners have to recertify annually or prove that they’ve learned new regulations. Your single course requires annual updates.

All learners cover the same content

Teaching all learners the same material saves time and money and ensures consistent levels of competency. Or does it?

• Not all learners need to know the material at all or at the same level of depth and mastery. You’re wasting people’s time and frustrating them by requiring them to cover material they don’t need to know.
• Not all learners are starting from the same point. Some have considerable knowledge, others are beginners — and the rest can fall anywhere in between. You’re wasting people’s time and frustrating them by requiring them to cover material they already know.

One-and-done training

Registering all learners for the same course is easy, and you can track who completed the training and show regulators that you’re in compliance. But what does that show?

• Exposing learners to information once doesn’t guarantee that they’ve learned it.
• Completing an eLearning course doesn’t mean learners understand, will remember, or are able to apply the material.
• Learners may miss new or updated content nestled among the same-old, same-old content they went through last year.

A passing grade

Learners all take the same exam, so you can show regulators that everyone has done the training and passed the test. So what?

• That comprehensive course covers dozens — maybe hundreds — of concepts, ideas, processes, rules. How many questions are on the exam? 25?
• If everyone gets the same questions, they can easily memorize the answers. Even if they get random questions from a large pool, you’re only asking each learner about a small fraction of the material. Getting a passing grade doesn’t mean … much.

These “benefits” do not look very efficient, cost-effective, or appealing when you examine them closely.

Adaptive Training Offers Targeted, Relevant Learning

Adaptive training takes a completely different approach. It considers learners as individuals. At the same time, creating an adaptive program on a platform like OttoLearn can be efficient and cost-effective. You create an extensive body of content, as you would when designing and developing a single comprehensive eLearning course — but you do not deliver all of it to all learners all at once.

Content is easy to update

Developers create a single pool of content, much like creating a single comprehensive eLearning module — with a key difference. The content is created as short, focused “micro-sized” units. Generally, each unit can stand on its own. Added together, the micro-units form a complete learning and knowledge retention program.

With an adaptive microlearning platform like OttoLearn, it’s easy to update individual elements of the content, like a single Activity. It’s equally easy to add new content, whether expanding the pool of Activities or adding new Concepts or Topics to a course Module. The new and updated content is immediately put into the content pool and delivered to learners, while old content is removed.

With OttoLearn, you get the efficiency of creating content once for all of your learners — and add the efficiency of easily keeping content up-to-date at all times.

Eliminate each learner’s knowledge gaps

A single course Module in OttoLearn serves all learners at all levels — without putting them all through the same training.

That’s the beauty of adaptive training. OttoLearn’s adaptive algorithms use the same pool of content to deliver a unique learning experience to each individual. Learners and their managers can set the level of expertise they need, choosing one of five levels ranging from Novice to Expert. Then, based on the learner’s performance and goals, Otto delivers the right content. Otto targets content to eliminate that individual’s knowledge gaps. At the same time, adaptive microlearning avoids the inefficient trap of forcing learners to spend time on material they know or that they don’t need to cover. If they need to quickly search for training content in the moment, they can also treat Otto as performance support tool.

Highly engaging learning

OttoLearn adaptive microlearning goes far beyond tracking whether a learner completed training and recording their test scores. Otto reminds learners to engage with training Activities and other gamified training content every day — or on a schedule the learner or manager chooses — and tracks their engagement and their mastery level. Otto also tracks the learner’s progress and performance and their confidence in their responses.

The OttoLearn algorithms use all of this information to determine which Activities to deliver to each learner. Otto:

• Fills knowledge gaps and strengthens recall through spaced repetition, by reminding learners of information often enough to cement it in their long-term memory
• Presents more complex material as learners’ mastery increases
• Exercises information in multiple ways, to test not only recall but understanding and ability to apply the information in everyday scenarios

 Otto will even deliver a weekly report to managers, detailing each employee’s progress and highlighting their new mastery level or identifying areas where they might need additional coaching.

Continuous microlearning improves knowledge retention

Many learners take “annual” training courses to meet legal or company requirements and take a single test at the end, covering a small amount of the content. Then they’re done for the year.

With OttoLearn, learners train every day or several times a week — all year long, year in and year out. They get different content each day, and they can add Topics or Modules or increase their mastery goals at any time.

In this way, OttoLearn adaptive microlearning thoroughly covers and reinforces all of the content that each learner needs to know. Learners see content often enough to remember it — but not so often that they simply memorize it by rote.

Adaptive Training Works

In a paper published in Computers in Human Behavior in 2018, researchers S. Hubalovskya, M. Hubalovskab, and M. Musilek found that adaptive learning improved the learning effectiveness of elementary-school pupils. Their definition of learning effectiveness considered both the accuracy of the learners’ work and the amount of time they spent on it. Thus, of two learners who answered correctly, the learner who answered more quickly was deemed to be learning more effectively.

They found that adaptive eLearning improved learner effectiveness by reducing wasted time and allowing learners to skip some material. They stated, “The learning effectiveness decreases with routine completion of simple exercises. Pupils thus lose motivation.”

In other words, using adaptive learning allows learners to focus on more challenging material, which they find more engaging. Rather than waste time on repetitive material they already know, learners stretch their knowledge — while spending less time on training. Extrapolated to a corporate setting, the result is that learners spend less time away from work and they get more benefit from the time spent on relevant and challenging training.

In “Decoding Adaptive,” the authors wrote, “Adaptive learning tools collect specific information about individual students’ behaviors by tracking how they answer questions. The tool then responds to each student by changing the learning experience to better suit that person’s needs, based on their unique and specific behaviors and answers.”

OttoLearn does all of this — and goes farther — by:

• Tracking both learners’ responses and their confidence level to better identify knowledge gaps
• Allowing learners to choose a unique learning path and the depth of knowledge they need

Completing training is meaningless if learners don’t retain and can’t apply the learning. Stop trying to force all of your learners to wear the same T-shirt. Ensure a perfect fit for each learner with OttoLearn adaptive microlearning. 

OttoLearn uses nine proven principles of learning science to drive real results. Learn more in The Cognitive Science Behind OttoLearn.