Designing Adaptive Learning Paths in E-Learning #196

Adaptive Path Branching in E-Learning #196: Challenge | Recap

E-learning courses are ideal for ensuring every employee receives the same training or communication message. This type of e-learning works well for compliance and policy courses. But the one-size-fits-all approach isn’t always the best one for performance-based topics such as leadership development, sales, and product training.

That’s because learners are unique. Their skills, knowledge, and experiences on a given topic will differ from one learner to the next. That’s where adaptive learning solutions can help.

With adaptive learning, one or more parts of the course will adapt to the skill level of the learners. Learners who demonstrate mastery early in the course could move faster through the course and be presented with more advanced scenarios and quizzes.

On the other hand, learners who underperform would move more slowly through the course and be presented with more practice opportunities and foundational information.

Simple Example of Adaptive Branching in Storyline

Here’s an example I often use in my variables workshop. It’s a simple project that leverages Storyline’s built-in results slide variables to determine how well a learner is performing during the course.

View project | Download (SL360) Download (SL2) | Video tutorial

Using conditional branching, learners who score below a determined point value will branch to a remediation scene where they’ll have additional practice activities. After some time, they can be branched back into the primary course.

The branching is transparent to the learner so they don’t even know they’re seeing different content from the other learners.

Challenge of the Week

This week, your challenge is to share an adaptive branching example.

Because the conditional logic takes place under the hood, it likely won’t be obvious to us where the branching occurs. Please include some type of annotation or notes in your example to let us know where the magic happens.

In the example I shared, I included the variable reference and notes to tell users where the learners would go next based on their current score.

Adaptive Learning

Last Week’s Challenge:

Before you adapt your examples to this week’s challenge, take some quality time to check out the personalized examples your fellow e-learning characters shared over the past week:

Choose Your Own E-Learning Characters #195

Choose Your Own E-Learning Characters #195: Challenge | Recap

Wishing you an adaptive week, E-Learning Heroes!

New to the E-Learning Challenges?

The weekly e-learning challenges are ongoing opportunities to learn, share, and build your e-learning portfolios. You can jump into any or all of the previous challenges anytime you want. I’ll update the recap posts to include your demos.

98 Comments
Jodi M. Sansone
Simon Blair

Here are my two: A tongue in cheek branched quiz I created in SL1 for the Football ELH challenge. It splits at the map. If you select North America, you get American Football questions. If you select anywhere else you get questions about the sport everybody else calls football ("soccer" to North Americans). Published output: https://storage.googleapis.com/simonblair-portfolio/Football/index.html Source file: https://goo.gl/j224Pk (the one called "Football.story") I also have a template for an adaptive course that I created for my DevLearn 17 session. There are two types of adaptation in it: - Chapters 1, 2, and 3 show remedial content if you got the associated pretest questions wrong - Chapters 4 and 5 show remedial content if you get the in-chapter question wrong There are ... Expand

Dan Graham
Zahra Bhojani
Emma Trantham
Meinou Lambeck
Michael Hinze

Here is a brief recording of a complex branching scenario: http://keypointlearn.com/youtube/sample09.html . The learner was presented with up to 30 short video clips. After each vid, the learner needed to decide what the best course of action was. Each decision node had at least three possible main outcomes; stop immediately and send the learner back to review the topic, proceed down an "okay" path(s), or proceed with the most appropriate course of action. Additional branches created loops and long-winded paths through the scenario. Scoring and branching adapted based on the elapsed time, the severity of the presented situation and previously selected choices that lead to a particular decision point. I did this project seven years ago in Flash, and yet, if I had to develop this today in S... Expand

Meinou Lambeck
Meinou Lambeck
Joshua Petermann
James Addoms
James Addoms
Dan Sweigert
James Addoms

Jackie beat me to it! Thank you, Jackie. Zahra, I was a little ahead of schedule because a former colleague of mine had recorded the audio for a section of an earlier piece I wrote that ended up being cut from a deployed course - so I had some audio content available. I had been toying with the architectural / blueprinty feel for a while, and the idea came together. I work a lot in PhotoShop, but for this challenge I used PowerPoint for media. The character set can be found online. I pasted each photorealistic character into ppt and used Artistic Effects > Photocopy - and recolored to B&W 75%. I then copied that image and re-pasted (essentially resetting those settings while keeping the output) and then used the "color" tool to apply the blue accent color. I used the same process for t... Expand

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Dan Sweigert
Dan Sweigert
Stephanie Harnett
iDesign Gyan
James Addoms
Robin Love