Originally Posted on the Praktio Blog
Maybe you've heard of "adaptive learning," maybe you haven't. If you have, maybe you're not entirely sure what it means.
Maybe you're skeptical about digital learning, maybe you're not. Perhaps you imagine talking head videos that—sure—can be broadcasted to millions at once but to the loss of the individualized, tailored potential of in-person, live, person-to-person training.
Of course, in-person, live training can be impersonal and generic too, but at least the forum—if it's a small enough group with a motivated- and skilled-enough instructor—allows for the potential for individualized learning.
Can we have our cake and eat it too?
Yes. Adaptive learning in digital training tools refers to learning that molds to the learner based on their performance through the course. Courses with adaptive features, for example, recognize when each learner makes a mistake and would benefit from additional instruction or practice on a specific topic or skill. In this way, adaptive learning allows digital training tools to be both boundlessly scalable and learner tailored.
Boundlessly Scalable - If a digital course is "asynchronous" (meaning, each learner can take the training on their own time, at their own pace), then the whole world could take the course, without the confines of finding common availability in schedules and the physical space to accommodate them.
Learner Tailored - Adaptive learning, as discussed above, tailors the learning experience to the user by learning their pain points through their individual performance in the course and serving up additional instruction or practice to address those identified pain points.
Adaptive learning is a powerful way to have the best of both training worlds, which is why we continue to develop increasingly powerful adaptive features in Praktio training. Our latest course, Precision Training for Litigators uses some fancy new features we built. Each exercise in the course is tagged for the specific issue it teaches; when a learner gets an exercise wrong, other exercises with the same tag are activated (one a few exercises later and another toward the end of the course).
And that's just the beginning—we have some exciting, additional features on our roadmap. These features will continue to build on that foundation to give each user increasingly particularized experiences inside the digital training environment, as well as actionable, learner-specific information for the learner to focus on in their work outside the course.
Michael