Hi Teun,
Nice to read about how to make the most of ChatGPT!
Just like using AI effectively, developing a good learning platform requires the right approach.
I’ll tell you more about how to optimally set up a learning platform to provide the best possible learning. Once you’ve developed great courses, or perhaps had them developed by a nice outside party, there is of course no escaping the fact that those courses must also be offered in some place.
In most cases, that is “the learning environment”: a central system where you log in and can follow the courses available to you/assigned to you.
There are many different learning platforms: from open source and free to being part of very expensive CRM systems.
But what makes a learning platform “good”?
Of course it must be secure and stable, load quickly and be usable on all possible devices.
But what other requirements can we make of it?
I’ll list a few for you.
User-centered
Who is the user?
In the context of an organization it will often be its own employee, but of course you can also use a learning platform to offer your product to the world.
In the first case, the user may not always be intrinsically motivated to learn something and will come to do courses “because they have to.”
In the second case, the user does come by choice, but you also have more to lose if the user does not perceive the platform as pleasant or user-friendly.
So make sure that users can quickly find what they are looking for.
That saves time and frustration.
Also offer content that the user may also find interesting, making the platform ‘adaptive’.
You can achieve this by having the user indicate what topics they are interested in, for example, and showing the content that matches that.
And who feels like “learning” something you already know, or don’t need to know at all?
Probably no one.
Especially if you want to make the material as accessible as possible, it can be valuable to add adaptivity to the learning platform.
Look at what the user already knows, such as through a starter test, and make the content that the user already has sufficient knowledge of optional.
Flexibility
If you want to offer training in a learning platform, you have probably already thought about what that training should look like, or perhaps the training already existed and is already established.
Maybe there is a “learning path” that consists of different parts; maybe some things are mandatory and other things are not.
Or there is a classroom part and you want your users to be able to sign up for that as well without having to go to another system.
It is nice if the learning platform can help you to offer the training as much as possible in one place and according to your wishes, and if you do not have to fit your training into a certain pattern “just because that is how the platform works”.
Interaction with other systems
There are many providers of “Content as a Service” these days.
Why develop a course on a certain topic yourself when your neighbor has already created a very good version, and also keeps it regularly updated and up to date?
In these cases, the LTI (Learning Tools Interoperability) standards are your friend and allow you to offer external content in your platform.
Or maybe you have created something yourself that you would like to offer to others?
And what about the automatic crediting of PE points, or the feedback of learning results to a CRM system?
There is a lot you can do to make life easier for everyone, but if the platform does not support it, that’s it.
Of course these are just a few points, there is much more that can contribute to a better learning experience.
But besides improving the learning environment, there is another important question: why would you want to keep learning in the first place?
Dewi, can you tell us more about the importance of lifelong learning?
Read on!
