“Improve the impact of learning via smart and evidence-based learning design”
The Learning Impact Award and its impact on learning
Let’s start with an understatement. It was quite a festive event; the international Learning Awards 2020 from The Learning and Performance Institute at the 5-star Park Lane Hilton. For all 700 attendees, and for us personally as well, as we won a silver award together with our client Online Academy in the Learning Impact category. Yes!
But most importantly, the learning community as a whole can also celebrate, with all those great achievements from all the winners. Let’s dive deeper into the contents of one of those winning cases (ours) and tell you why our entry makes impact.
Who is who
Online Academy is a Dutch training provider and important part of NCOI Group: one of the largest consortia of training providers and private education institutions in Europe. Online Academy plays a specific role inside the group, as it is the main ‘vehicle’ for innovation for the whole organisation. It does so by initiating and conducting research in collaboration with universities. The research focuses on which approaches create effective learning outcomes. The insights are used by Online Academy and NCOI Group to improve their approaches time after time, and thus creating relevant and impactful learning experiences for their clients. It’s understandable why Online Academy is seen by some as a true ‘impact engine’ for the organisation.
The aNewSpring adaptive and blended learning platform is the platform that Online Academy uses to design and deliver all their programs. During the latest research, one of the main topics was to find out more about the effectiveness of personalised/adaptive learning. Both via the adaptive functionalities that the aNewSpring platform offers (for already 10 years!) and via using different design principles.
From nomination to award
How does the process of ‘learning awards’ work? The entry process starts by providing key information about your project related to the criteria provided. This is an online process. The jury then shortlists eight finalists.
These finalists present their entry (live or online) to a panel of judges made up by industry experts and answer some questions. hen the waiting starts. It’s only at the evening of the (excellent) event that the winners of bronze, silver and gold are announced. As a partner of The Learning and Performance Institute, our CEO Martèn de Prez also presented an award. And like you have seen; it’s strictly black-tie. The LPI really knows how to celebrate learning!
The research
The research was conducted together with the University of Amsterdam. Its design focussed on some ‘classical’ A-B studies combined with a pre-test-post-test-approach. This means creating randomised groups of people (A and B) and give them a different ‘treatment’, based on the hypothesis that the one is more effective than the other. In workplace learning, this is a very brave and unconventional approach. It’s hard to create the circumstances where you can deliberately offer half of the group a good/effective training program and the other half a possibly ‘bad’/less effective program. Online Academy took a smart approach to tackle this: they offered the training program ‘Information Security’ for free to their existing customers and were clear about the fact that learners would be part of this experiment.
Online Academy took this research design even a step further to combine different research questions. They also had to create five different ‘learning journeys’ on the aNewSpring platform to have the right and different ‘treatments’ to do the research. The different designs were related to adaptive / non-adaptive and to learning preferences: text based, audio based or a combination.
It took three months to develop the five different learning journeys, creating 177 screens, and 510 questions. In total 397 participants completed the course.
Key findings (the results)
Some of the most important results were:
- Adaptive learners achieve the level of competency 3.7 times faster than those who followed the non-adaptive learning journey.
- Competency scores were measured to be 15% higher in the adaptive group.
- Within the adaptive learners the learners who were exposed to most content performed best on the post-test.
- When learners were matched to a design that focussed on their learning preference they did not significantly score better compared to non-preference.
Conclusion
The research results provide clear outcomes and advice what to do and what not to do to improve the impact of learning via smart and evidence-based learning design. It gives a clear answer to the question when an adaptive course is useful. This is where the impact is made; it gives valuable insights for the whole NCOI Group on how to improve their courses for the benefit of their learners. If these results are scaled up (this has to been researched), a rough extrapolation indicates some 25% reduction in time. The best part is that the research and results are open to the whole learning community, so everyone can improve their learning solutions. We told you the learning community had a reason to celebrate.
Curious for more?
Take a look at the full case of Online Academy:
anewspring.com/cases/ncoi-online-academy-adaptive-training-privacy-security
Or our interview with Karin from Online Academy about making the learning journey:
anewspring.com/e-learning-with-online-academy/
