According to experts, Big Data is becoming increasingly important for all industries in the future – including further education. But what is it all about and how can you use Big Data? We shed light on the topic.
Big Data and digital learning – how does that work together?
Debadrita Sengupta from eLearning Industry has tackled this question. We have summarized the most exciting points from the article “How can Big Data help Digital Learning Professionals?” for you.
First, we should clarify what Big Data actually means:
Big Data is a way to analyze large and complex datasets that cannot be captured with traditional software. This computational analysis serves to uncover patterns, trends, and associations, particularly concerning human behavior and interactions.
In many industries, Big Data analysis is already an integral part of daily work life. According to experts, in the future three-quarters of all companies worldwide will invest in large data analysis. In particular, Big Data will play an increasingly central role in the education sector and support so-called digital learning experts (or digital learning professionals).
In terms of digital learning, Big Data includes the data created by employees in companies while they complete a digital learning course, such as an e-learning program. This includes, among other things, learning progress, assessment results, and social interaction.
Big Data is an integral part of many companies – and will become increasingly important in the coming years.
This is how Big Data can help digital learning professionals:
First and foremost, Big Data supports your learning representatives (for example, in-house trainers or coaches) in the adjustment and optimization of their courses and training offerings. This allows learners to experience a significantly more personalized, effective, engaging, and informative learning experience. This leads to more qualified employees and consequently to more growth and productivity in your company!
Specifically, there are four aspects of Big Data that help you optimize further education in your company:
1. You receive better feedback for optimization
When you can collect data while your employees are taking training courses, valuable insights arise for your digital learning experts. They derive how to improve their courses and thus provide greater value for the learners.
The learning employees receive individual feedback from the responsible party and can therefore correct their own mistakes in the future.
2. You can create personalized courses
In digital learning strategies, the learner is at the center. This increases the engagement of the learners and the knowledge conveyed is better absorbed and retained longer.
Through the use of Big Data, digital learning experts have a better understanding of how learners acquire information and which learning strategies work for them and which do not. They also learn more about the interests of the learners and see what they need. This also helps your learning experts create personalized and efficient courses.
3. You can observe learning patterns
Big Data enables you to track every action of your learners throughout the course. For example, how quickly the learning units are completed or when participants work on tasks. Do they prefer to learn during the day or late at night? Are they fast readers, or do your employees struggle with texts? From this, as a learning representative, you can deduce the intervals at which new content should be sent to participants and how much time they need for completion.
When your course leaders know how the learners behave in the courses, they can offer appropriate courses to further improve individual skills.
4. You gain better insights into the learning process
Big Data helps your learning professionals understand how learners acquire and process knowledge. The better and more profound the understanding of your learning representatives, the better the courses they design will be, and the better the learners will respond to these courses.
In contrast to point 3, this mainly addresses the individual processes and preferences during learning. Does a person learn better with visual stimuli, or do detailed texts help them? Can the learner apply new knowledge actively and immediately, or do they need practical examples? Depending on this, learning representatives can resort to various media for different learning types, thereby supporting the individual learning process.
As you can see, Big Data can effectively improve and simplify your further education measures. Large companies that want to remain relevant in the future should engage more deeply with the implementation of Big Data in their further education measures. Especially for in-house training, Big Data analysis brings new opportunities that you should not miss!
Big Data is just one topic that will become increasingly relevant for training and further education in the future. Do you want to avoid missing news on these topics and stay informed about e-learning, blended learning, and other trends? Then feel free to subscribe to our free newsletter and receive two new exciting articles directly via email once a week!
