Some concepts in learning just seem to irritate people. Others meet universal approval. Walk into any L & D conference mutter ‘LMS’ and chances are you’ll get short shrift from the assembled audience. On the other hand, shove the words ‘personalised learning environment’ into the conversation and you’ll soon have people crowding round, probably volunteering to charge your glass if you hang around long enough for the after-drinks (note I haven’t actually tried this yet and may have overstated its power but it’s definitely worth a go).
I’ve never quite grasped the loathing of the LMS. But I think I see why people feel so warm and gooey towards the PLE concept. There seems to be little way that, in the age of the ‘me’, the concept of personalisation could in any way be judged to be a bad thing.
But after the initial fuss and back-slapping dies down, it’ s worth saying what we actually mean by a ‘PLE’. This is not as straight forward as may first appear. You can find more than a dozen definitions here alone – some of them even contrary. I’ve no wish to add yet more definitions to the pot. But even at the most basic level I am aware that personalisation of learning means different things to different people. All the following must qualify for a start:
- Learning delivered based on the learners own requests. The learner chooses and gets the information they want.
- Learning provided conditionally on the learner’s own achievements or results. A learner is provided with the precise information they need, based on assessment results or similar, rather than what is available.
- Learning specified for a specific learner based on external criteria. This might be new career opportunities, changes in local requirements or an identification of underlying skills via an allied talent management system. In this case the learning is personalised to suit the organisation’s needs
- Learning which the delivery method is tailored to suit the learner: how they want or find most convenient to learn, be it video, live on line, social learning or whatever.
All of these quite definitely qualify as a personalised learning solution. Whichever you prefer, there is a clear agreement that personalisation is a good thing. Indeed, a large learning content provider recently surveyed its users and revealed that 77% of L&D professionals feel that personalised learning is vital to employee engagement.
It’s for reasons like this that today’s new systems such as Netex learningCloud take learning personalisation really seriously. Netex learningCloud is designed from the ground up to encourage engagement and interactions via personalisation which can deliver configurable and customisable learning for everyone. We can’t promise it will make your learners feel all warm and gooey but it will help them learn what they really want and need to.
