What’s the Difference Between Personalized and Adaptive Learning?

Adaptive learning and personalized learning have ascended as two of the primary learning methods involved in eLearning. What exactly are they and which type should you plan to implement in your own courses?

Adaptive Learning

Adaptive learning focuses on optimizing educational content to each individual learner using previous data. If you struggled in a certain area of a course, an eLearning platform with adaptive learning in mind will account for this and re-emphasize these areas to confirm understanding. Ultimately, adaptive learning recognizes that all learners have certain strengths and weaknesses and attempts to tailor each user’s experience accordingly.

When you involve adaptive learning in your eLearning courses, you are recognizing that a cookie cutter, one-size-fits-all solution is outdated and ineffective. For this reason, adaptive learning has grown in popularity in the world of eLearning and will only continue to do so.

Personalized Learning

Personalized learning is a broader term that is refers to a customized journey or map that individuals follow as part of their own unique learning process. The custom path that learners take can be shaped by a variety of factors. Instructors or supervisors can help personalize a course based on their prior knowledge of each participant and pretests also help shape everyone’s unique path. Additionally, personalized learning also accounts for individual user feedback when creating the best possible solution for each employee. The logic here is simple: data, instructor observation and student feedback are all key components in creating the perfect learning roadmap.

Which is Best?

In truth, you’ll want to include both personalized and adaptive learning in your eLearning courses for best results. The raw data that adaptive learning solutions use to shape user experiences are key for making sure each trainees’ weaknesses are addressed and strengths are reinforced. Personalized learning adds a layer of customizability to the mix, as both users and instructors have the ability to make adjustments to the experience as they go in an effort to make sure each participant gets the maximum out of their time and effort.

Add Personalized and Adaptive Learning to Your eLearning Repertoire with Nickel City Learning Solutions

Nickel City Learning Solutions is your one-stop source for all of your training needs. Our philosophy is that learning should be fun, relevant, and measurable. Please don’t hesitate to contact us for further information regarding the implementation of eLearning solutions at your business.

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Our Clients

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The Money School

Money School’s founder Chris Naugle had a great idea: teach people how money really works and how to become their own banker rather than pay interest and fees to everyone else.

Optimum Safety Group

Optimum had a large cache of existing material that needed an update. We created a large batch of e-learning modules for Optimum with a focus on deployment on mobile platforms.

International Solutions Group

The International Solutions Group wanted the ability to distribute their course to a larger population while maintaining the same quality.

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