Adaptive Learning: train your teams more quickly and effectively

Published by Staff

If you want to train your sales teams in, say, mastering a new offering, you have several solutions at your disposal. You can provide a trainer or coach that will guide each of your staff on an individual basis. That’s as good as it gets in terms of effective teaching. Obviously if you have a lot of people to train, you might pick group sessions. The training still takes place in the classroom but you seek and gain economies of scale. Finally, if the group in question is very large, spread out and varied, you will opt for an ample dose of digital training.

In sum, everyone agrees that in absolute terms, individual programs and feedback are the most effective, but there are fewer and fewer big companies with the resources to ignore the advantages of digital programs, which are quick, consistent and cost-effective.

Adaptive learning: digital one-on-one!

Adaptive learning is an online teaching method that adapts to each learner automatically, in real time. Read the previous sentence one more time because that’s what distinguishes adaptive learning from other online teaching methods. The core idea is to offer the advantages of one-on-one while harnessing the power of technology.

We might as well tell you now that at Halifax Consulting, we are very enthusiastic about this new way of developing digital training modules. It requires some precision, but when the platform lives up to its billing, the results are magical.

We are lucky enough to have formed a partnership with Area9 to distribute its platform to our clients. You can watch the video at the bottom of this article to learn a bit more about the technology and Area9’s expertise in the field.

For a quick overview, here are the three main advantages of training using the adaptive learning method.

Training time cut in half

Objections to setting aside time for training are an issue that often crops up. Offering training to master a subject in half the time is both a way to handle these objections and a real means of saving time for doing business.

100% guarantee of subject mastery

This is another very ambitious pledge. How can it be kept? Simply because with adaptive learning, you can’t make progress by mindlessly clicking through the screens. Each point in the program comprises three elements: an extremely specific learning goal, content focused on that goal, and a mini-test. If the test is not passed, the content and questions (or similar questions) reappear.

The process is very personalized from both a timing and a content standpoint.

It can be adapted to each learner’s level. You’ll find an example below showing the statistics for three different learners in the same program.

This infographic shows the many advantages of adaptive learning.

The completion times vary greatly depending on the learners’ level. The first was clearly already a subject expert and finished in 8 minutes, while no. 3 needed 33 minutes. The size of the bubbles represents how many times the learner had to return to a subject to master it.
We also see that learner no. 2 mistakenly believes they are competent 4 times out of 10. That’s another advantage of the method: highlighting areas where unconscious incompetence is the most prevalent.
Lastly, we also see that each learner took a different path to understanding. That’s the magic of the Area9 platform, which adapts to each person’s learning process.

I’m going to end here on the topic, but suffice to say that the technology behind this pledge is nothing to sneeze at—it’s the result of 20 years of experience and billions of data points gathered from the experiences of 20 million learners.

I suggest that you watch the video below, which explains how it works and our partner’s excellence in the field.