Designing Online Learning Experience

I am a big advocate of self-paced online learning. The entire skill of film editing I have acquired over the years has been through online learning from various professional websites, online videos, and articles on the internet. In this era of information at your fingertips, there is absolutely no excuse for anyone to say “I do not know”. It only takes a keyword search in Google to find what you want to learn.

There are several benefits of online learning. A large benefit of professional learning platforms such as LinkedIn learning (previously Lynda.com) or Udemy is the training is standardized. Every time you access it, it will always be there in its original form. Another one is it is self-paced (or in other words, on-demand). You can choose what you want to learn, and when you want to learn it. Another one is, if designed right, it can be interactive and super fun to take it. The delivery medium for the training can change from text to images to video to sound, and there could be several options to learn the same idea in numerous different ways. 

One could certainly compare this to books. Books are also a form of standardized training. Once they are printed, the text is there. It does not change. It is on-demand too. You can choose which page you want to read and when you want to read it. Books can also have images, figures, photos, graphics. So how are books are different?

Here comes the fun part. Not the customers, but the instructors of training content benefit a great deal from the online learning experience. As a learning experience designer myself, I would like to share some ideas. Here they are.

I always follow a PDCA approach to all of my business and creative projects. It deals with, 

1. You plan something

2. You do something according to your plan

3. You check what you have done, this tells you what you need to improve

4. You act on what you could improve

5. You plan again

The creators of books (authors) come up with an idea for a book (P in PDCA) and they write and publish the book (D in PDCA). But they cannot measure how an individual is responding to the book reading experience. The only data that they would get is overall reader response or some critical articles. But the individual responses to their content would still be missing. The creator experience kind of stops after the D part in PDCA for books.

For creators of online content, the C and A are very much possible. Here are some ways to achieve them.

You can only manage what you measure

I cannot stress this enough. There are several instances in our lives where we run into managing things that we have no clue about. Continuous pursuit of measurement is extremely crucial in anything that we manage, because you can only manage what you measure. If you cannot measure it, you are not controlling it, period. One of the significant advantages of a online learning experience, since it is delivered via some sort of “online” tool, is the ability to gather data from users. Data such as roles and groups within a company accessing the training, the frequency of visits, and users’ comprehension through some quiz allow “measuring” the learner engagement and training effectiveness, and therefore provide ample opportunities to make data-driven decisions about the training. Therefore, I think one of the major considerations for designing a online learning experience should be determining

1. which data is useful to capture, and

2. the points at which the data should be captured. 

Making an intentional effort to make these decisions will go a long way in creating a state-of-the-art learning experience for the end-user.

Personalize

Another advantage of the online learning experience is the ability to personalize the content according to the user’s role. The more customized the content is for the user, the more engaged the user is going to be, and the more successful the training will become.

Personalized content is something we see this all the time during our online presence on the internet. For example, if you are browsing Macy’s website, your Instagram feed will show you Macy’s ads. There is an immense opportunity to build intelligence in the learning experience that will make the customer “feel” special because the content would be designed for her. 

In my mind, there are three steps to personalize training content.

1. Creating personas for users

2. Making the training modular and assign specific modules to specific personas

3. Creating an intelligent tool where based on the user information, a persona and modules associated with the persona are assigned to the user

In the figure above, m1-5 are the training modules. p1 and p2 are the personas. A personalized training for persona p1 contains modules m1, m2 and m4, similarly training for p2 contains m1, m3 and m5. Now, when user signs up in the tool, she would provide some information about herself that would include her. Based on the role, intelligence should be built into the tool to match her a persona, and then select respective modules, and make them available to her. 

Modular Continuous Improvement

There is a saying in the film community that a film is never finished. The film you see in theaters (or now on streaming platforms) is the best possible version that the filmmakers could make with the available content by the film’s release date. If film editors had all the time in the world, the film would always sit on their editing table being edited and improved, and would never come out. Just like that, any creative design will always finish with a deadline, not because the design is perfect. A design is never perfect. Continuous improvement is a way of life. You can always make your design better.

A great advantage of online learning, with planned data gathering opportunities and modular design for personalization, is the modularity of the training content itself. Since modules are individual chunks for designed training, they can be on their independent improvement paths opening the doors for modular continuous improvement. This is unique to online training since the modules are independent entities (as compared to in-person training, where to implement an improvement to a certain part of her training, the instructor has to host another full session).

In the figure below, modules m1 and m4 are still at their first version, however m3 and m5 to their second versions and m2 has advanced to its third version. The online learning experience always has the latest improved versions of the individual modules.

To summarize, if we follow the PDCA (Plan-Do-Check-Act) approach for designing a online learning experience, the following steps would emerge. 

1. Plan the learning experience with planned opportunities to gather data and modular design (P in PDCA). 

2. Design and implement a robust intelligent delivery mechanism for the personalized experience to gather data (D in PDCA).

3. Analyze the data to continuously improve the experience for the end-user (C in PDCA). 

4. Continuously improve each training module independently with the learnings from the analyzed data (A in PDCA).

Would love to know your thoughts.

Ashay Javadekar