Tricks To Personalize ELearning

By: Justin Ferriman • May 22, 2015
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Despite all of the great advantages of elearning, people aren’t always fond of it.

Many prefer live instruction because of the interaction that comes with being in a classroom setting. If live instruction isn’t possible, then it isn’t uncommon for people to pursue webinars.

In other words, there is an isolation factor to elearning that has to be addressed.

To counteract this aspect of elearning, you need to build in various communication points in your courses. In some respects, you need to over-communicate.

Communication can take a few different forms. Actually, perhaps a better word is “interaction”. By building interaction points within your online courses, you provide the learner with an element that comes more natural during live-instruction.

One of the easiest ways to add interaction to your courses is through communication triggers. By way of example, we provide two quick ways of doing this when using the LearnDash WordPress LMS.

  1. Using badge & point notifications
  2. Sending emails based on user activity

These two strategies have similar, yet slightly different intentions. The first of which is with the purpose of providing some gamification elements to the course content, which makes the learning experience more entertaining (among other things).

This has an immediate impact to the learner since it happens instantly while they take the course.

The other strategy (sending emails based on user activity) is meant to increase communication with the learner outside of the course. For example, if someone fails a quiz, then you may want to send them an email of encouragement. You could also include resources to help them better grasp the material.

Both of these simple, ninja strategies create interaction points and add a “human” element to elearning – something that is often missing today in online courses.

Justin Ferriman

Justin started LearnDash, the WordPress LMS trusted by Fortune 500 companies, major universities, training organizations, and entrepreneurs worldwide. He is currently founder & CEO of GapScout. Justin’s Homepage | GapScout | Twitter