In the latest Netex webinar, Mike Byrne and Joserra Mosteiro looked at intelligent content and how content combined with new analytics can help us create a richer online learning experience.
Intelligent content is typically defined as content that is responsive, structurally rich, personalised, easily searchable (using metadata) and updatable. It is a concept of the multi-device, interactive media age. But today’s definition – one which focuses on all web content (rather than just elearning) – falls someway short of what is actually possible with intelligent elearning content in 2015, a point the webinar picked up on.
Really intelligent content
Really intelligent elearning content would enable learning professionals to do so much more than just the delivery-type benefits envisaged above. It would enable trainers to properly interact with the learners and collaborate with them and perhaps each other. It would enable interactions to happen within the content itself. It would enable users and trainers to get alerts according to what they actually did within that content, not just as a pre-formed template.
The starting point for this brave new world of elearning content is better analysis of the learning activity. This is not about reports telling who did what and when but real, involving analytics. It is about understanding individuals learning challenges and being able to customise that training for them. It is about providing unique feedback and having the learning content direct learning professionals to where they needed – just like in classroom learning. To do this, more interactions must be collected – the more the better in fact. But the Tin Can (xAPI) now enables us to do that. Netex showed us that it is already creating content using this technology and achieving this end. This is content where the analytics are built into the content itself from the ground up. The content shifts from being something launched on a platform to a real application with its own management capacity.
Beyond your LMS
In this case, the benefits to the trainer are huge. The content liberates the trainer from the ties of the LMS. It launches independently and can carry all its own data. The content also provides tools that will help understand the activity and dynamics of the group. Of course it can also contain gamification and badging support as well as forum areas and information about acquired competencies. All the things and so much more than you would find in your LMS.
You can discover more by listening to a recording of the webinar, or simply viewing the slides here.
