Personalization has become the first priority of customers no matter if it is an e-commerce business or the field of education. Online education has not only become the trend but also the need of the hour because of the increasing online course creation process and incorporating personalized learning in your online course can be a tough job as you are not interacting with your customers and learners face to face which is way more helpful to understand your audience and to know what are their preferences. While people can reach out to your courses at different times according to their convenience on their mobile phones, it can be difficult for you to manage and understand what your audience wants so that you can make an engaging course for them that caters to personalization.
While the online course creation process can be an extensive journey to prepare perfect content for your audience, it may need a lot of time and hard work to pay attention to each learner personally to provide them with a personalization experience, let’s get to know some of the concrete ways to incorporate personalized learning in your online course.
What is Personalized Learning?
Personalized learning is the process of providing dedicated services and teaching methods for all of your learners according to their preferences and learning capabilities. This can be a little bit time-consuming but incorporating personalized learning in your course creation process has multiple benefits. It comforts the students as they find the content catering to their requirements and it encourages them to not only complete the course but also give references to other people if your course has the quality and it is engaging.
Why Adopt Personalized Learning in Your Course Creation Process?
Before we understand the best practices to make your course personalized to your audience, let’s understand why personalized learning is crucial and what benefits you will get by approaching personalized learning in your course creation process:
- Better Understanding of Your Learners: All the websites and online companies today gather the data of their target audience through various means like website data or social media insights. Focusing on each student on a personal basis helps you to understand the preferences and learning levels of your learners and prepare the content accordingly. When you know your learners very well, you will no longer have to waste your time gathering and making high-level content that will be of no use if your learners don’t have that much cognitive eligibility to grasp all the content. Along with giving you an idea of your learners, it will also save you time, money, and resources.
- Higher Engagement: Have you faced difficulties while asking questions to your learners about the topics you are teaching them? This might be because the topic doesn’t cater to their interests or your teaching style is a little complex for them to understand whatever you are teaching. When you have proper knowledge of the preferences of each learner, they take interest in this and thus they are more likely to engage among their own group or their tutors increasing your engagement rates that will also attract new audiences.
- Individualized Pace: When you help your learners personally, they will further reach higher positions in their respective careers and you will have a strong portfolio as a course creator or a tutor. Thus, personalized learning helps not only your learners but it is crucial for your own identity in the market and the online course creation process.
How to Practice Personalize Learning in Your Course Creation Process?
- Learner-Centric Goals: When you think of starting or making an online course, right from then make a list of the characteristics and demographics of your audience for whom your course is appropriate. Based on your target audience, you can frame learner-centric goals which means what can be the possible expectations of your audience from your course regardless of the price of your course.
- Understanding Learning Styles: Incorporating Personalization in your course means dealing with different learner personas and expectations. Some of your audience will already have a good knowledge of the course they are taking while some of them are just introducing themselves to that particular sphere. Some of them will be tech-savvy while others will have a little knowledge of technology and modern devices. Thus, practicing personalized learning in your course creation process will demand you to have the knowledge of various learning styles along with a number of multimedia elements like videos, podcasts, interactive simulations, and written content, to cater to different learning preferences.
- Conducting Learner Assessment: As we discussed the benefits of knowing your target audience and learners well, now the question is how you can do it. To assess the existing knowledge, skills, and learning preferences of your learners you can gather pre-course surveys, diagnostic assessments, or self-assessment quizzes. On the basis of this data, you can divide the whole session into two portions and can provide advanced resources or optional challenges to the learners who already have quite good knowledge of the course and can give more time and focus on the portion that is starting from the beginning with you.
- Customizable Learning Paths: Customizable learning path is the center of personalized learning. Divide the course content into modules or units according to its difficulty level and complete the course gradually if it contains various complex topics and concepts. As the preferences of all the people differ from each other, there will be people who love to read text information and there will be some of them who like to indulge in visual content or a podcast, to make sure that the content is customized to cater the preferences of your audience to give them a personalized experience in your online course creation process, make sure that you are updating all the content in all the available formats so that you don’t lose a significant portion of your potential audience.
- Real-Time Feedback and Assessment: In this digital age no matter if it is a learner or a buyer scrolling through an e-commerce website, people don’t have even a little bit of patience and they want instant and immediate response to even a small work they have done. While technology is constantly evolving, instant feedback is important to provide your learners a personalized learning in this tech-savvy world as feedback is a crucial element of teaching and learning. With the help of various platforms and applications, you can provide your learners with real-time feedback on assessments, quizzes or assignments according to their learning level. This automated feedback can also save you time in your online course creation process which you would waste in revising the same questions in order to provide the learners with their answers. The automated feedback on various applications can automatically provide the learners with correct answers, give detailed explanations, and even suggest relevant doubts.
Conclusion:
No matter if someone is shopping online or taking online classes or buying an online course, personalization is their first priority, and ignoring this will not only make you lose a potential audience but is a big hurdle in the success of your online course creation process. Not acknowledging the necessity of personalized learning will also take your significant time, money, and resources as well as a lot of your energy as you will spend most of it preparing the content in the conventional way when you will not able to know what is going on your audience’s mind but in this technical age data and insights can tell you everything from where are most of your audience, what is their demographics and what are their preferences, so not making the optimum use of the technology from your course creation to understanding your audience, it will take a lot of efforts for your online course creation process to make you stand in the competition as a successful online course creator. From learning about a field through a detailed online course to taking your online course creation process to the next level, stay tuned with Digital Freedom Society.