As any client-driven business knows, everything from travel apps, to vitamins, to haircare is now personalized. So why should learning be any different? Personalized learning has become one of the most important trends in both academic and corporate learning spaces, but the reason for its rise to prominence isn’t what you think. It’s not the trendiness of personalization in general that makes personalized learning so popular, but the effectiveness of this tailored learning approach.
Personalized learning is a tailored approach to teaching designed with individual learners’ potential in mind. It can be defined as any learning format grounded in efforts to significantly tailor education to meet the needs of individual learners. Under this approach, each student receives an individualized pathway to learning goals based on their strengths, needs, interests and skills. Still, there are different types of personalized learning and, depending on your context, one type might be better suited than others to helping you meet your teaching and learning goals. Below, we lay out the 4 core types of personalized learning to help you decide how best to incorporate this popular trend.
Types of Personalized Learning
Pace-Driven
In pace driven learning formats, an existing body of learning materials is made available to learners who are given the freedom to move through the curriculum and assignments, you guessed it, at their own pace. This kind of personalized learning environment is welcoming to non-traditional learners, for example, part-time learners who might work full-time jobs and attend school in the evenings. Most often, these materials are made available online through digital platforms that allow learners to slow down or speed up as they see fit and according to their own needs.
Interest-Driven
Employees today want to learn, and the decision to stay with or leave an employer can come down to the amount of career and personal development they receive. An interest-driven learning approach leans into this, and encourages employees to identify new skills and knowledge they would like to develop and helps facilitate the necessary learning. This form of personalized learning is ideal for companies who want to leverage corporate training programs as an employee benefit, offering personal and career development opportunities tailored to their employees’ career development interests.
Inquiry-Driven
This interactive approach works well in group settings like management training or corporate training where learning goals and materials are already established. In this approach, learners are given access to the curriculum to review on their own. The group then comes back together for discussion, driven solely by learner questions on topics and concepts they did not adequately understand. This approach helps personalize the learning experience, and also works to identify common performance or knowledge gaps and promotes learning ownership of difficult or complex topics.
Technology-Driven
Technology-supported learning (eLearning, digital learning) lends itself extremely well to incorporating personalized learning touches. From personalized platform access and welcome tutorials, to tailored course sequencing and custom curriculum, online platforms excel at personalized learning. For example, at HFX, our business simulation course platform features both class-level and individual-level personalization features that not only help make the learning experience more engaging, but help serve individual learners’ and classes’ unique needs.
Conclusion
Today’s learner can recognize one-size-fits-all training content from a mile away, and, recognizing that it’s not tailor-made for them, will quickly disengage. This is why personalization has become such a popular and effective trend in all learning formats, from academic education to corporate training. If you’re interested in learning more about how to benefit from the personalized learning approach, contact the HFX Training team today.
