Unless you have spent time in the education industry, you may not have heard of adaptive learning, but you have more than likely experienced it. When you were a child, you probably read a “choose your own adventure” book where you were able to select what happened at certain points in the story.
Based on your choices, you could end up with a different story each time. Those books are a simple form of adaptive learning that creates a custom path with varied content based on the answers selected.
While there is not a firm definition everyone agrees upon, the one most commonly referenced defines adaptive learning as an educational experience that adjusts to a user’s interactions in real time to provide individual support.
Adaptive learning makes the user an active participant, increasing the likelihood the information will be retained once the lesson is complete.
In 2018, researchers at West Virginia University published the results of a four-year study looking at the use and effects of an adaptive online homework system compared to a traditional online system. The study found increased odds that average, below average and failing students receive a higher final letter grade and 69% of students self-reported changes in study habits.
If this type of learning technique works well in educational settings, it makes sense that it could be applied to workplace training.
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Adaptive Safety Training
When it comes to training, creating a completely personalized experience can be expensive, both in money and time. But customization to a certain extent can be reached through the use of branching logic, which creates a custom path with varied content based on the answers selected. Many times, this is presented in a way that the user does not even notice, and you may not realize would be considered “customized” training.
Think about a training course over different types of gloves. The user may be required to choose the right glove for certain situations. If they choose incorrectly, the content that appears next would walk the learner through what is wrong with that option. If they choose correctly, the course would continue moving forward.
Instead of the usual quiz style where you are simply shown the correct answer on a missed question, this adaptive style explains the correct answer. In the context of occupational health and safety, it is often just as important to understand the “why” as it is to understand the “what.”
This might not appear at the outset to be very adaptive, but not every user will have the same experience. Additionally, if a user completes the course multiple times, they may have a slightly different experience each time as well.
A Unique Solution
As a leading online training company for more than 30 years, SafetySkills incorporates adaptive learning into the backbone of more than 850 training courses using a proprietary development tool known as Adaptive Branching Learning Engagement, or ABLE.
Building training content with this development tool results in dynamic, interactive courseware that provides learners with a unique and memorable training experience.
There are multiple pieces of online safety training where adaptive learning can play a role, including the courseware itself, the competency quiz questions and even the language selection.
Adaptive Branching Courses
Let’s say your employees are taking a driver safety course. One user might choose to turn right at a stop sign where they see a child chasing their dog across the road, while another user chooses to turn left and comes across a group of bicyclists in the street.
These users will experience different hazards during their training but they will both end up learning about safe driving. In safety training, the learning competencies are important, but providing unique training experiences — that make a lasting impression — is perhaps even more important.
Adaptive Branching Quizzes
As mentioned, if learners don’t retain the information provided in a safety training course, then the training is essentially useless. Similarly, if users can blindly click through competency quizzes to find and memorize the right answer, or can copy from a neighbor going through training at the same time, they also will be doing themselves a disservice.
Adaptive branching inserts dynamic quizzes within safety training courses, ensuring learners answer their given quiz questions on their own. This means users may take the course multiple times but will never see identical quiz questions. Additionally, because the quizzes are dynamic, those taking the course at the same time cannot simply copy off their neighbor.
Adaptive Branching Languages
A common issue that arises with one-size-fits-all training is delivery typically being only in English even if that is not the native language of all trainees. Unsurprisingly, many studies have found that limited English proficient (LEP) workers not only understand less of English-language training, but they also typically do not have the skills to convey their lack of understanding.
Utilizing this unique authoring tool means language selectors are available within the courses themselves, allowing the learner to select their own course language from a language list. This takes the burden off the training administrators to know which language each learner would prefer to take their training in.
A Personalized Training Experience For Your Employees
Every SafetySkills course follows the concept of competency-based training, meaning the user must successfully answer all questions of one section before moving onto the next. Integrating this type of learning solution into your safety training provides assurance that your employees fully understand the material presented to them.
Combining this standard with the proprietary development tool used to build every SafetySkills training course provides a personalized feel to your safety training, which can make the information more easily retained and therefore much more effective.
Browse the full SafetySkills course catalog to see everything we offer or schedule a free demo today to learn more about how utilizing adaptive branching learning engagement can help your organization and your employees.
