According to experts, Big Data will become increasingly important for all industries in the future – including in further education. But what is it really about and how can you utilize Big Data? We shed light on the matter.
Big Data and digital learning – how does that work together?
This question has been addressed by Debadrita Sengupta from eLearning Industry. We have summarized the most interesting 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 of analyzing large and complex datasets that cannot be captured by conventional software. This computational analysis aims to reveal patterns, trends, and associations, particularly regarding 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 global companies will invest in large data analytics. Especially in the education sector, Big Data will play an increasingly central role and support so-called digital learning professionals.
With regard to digital learning, Big Data encompasses the data generated by employees in companies as they complete a digital learning course, such as e-learning. 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.
How Big Data can help digital learning professionals:
Primarily, Big Data supports your learning facilitators (such as internal trainers or coaches) in adapting and optimizing their courses and training offerings. This enables learners to experience a significantly personalized, more effective, engaging, and informative learning experience. This leads to significantly more qualified employees and consequently also to more growth and productivity in your company!
Specifically, the following four aspects of Big Data help you optimize training in your company:
1. You get better feedback for optimization
When you can collect data while your employees complete training courses, valuable insights emerge for your digital learning professionals. They can derive how to improve their courses and provide a higher value for the learners.
The participating employees receive individual feedback from the responsible person and can thus address their own mistakes targetedly in the future.
2. You can create personalized courses
In digital learning strategies, the learner is at the center. This increases the engagement of learners and the knowledge conveyed is better absorbed and retained longer.
By using Big Data, digital learning professionals gain a better understanding of how learners acquire information and which learning strategy works for them and which does not. They also learn more about learners' interests and see what they need. This helps your learning professionals create personalized and efficient courses.
3. You can observe learning patterns
Big Data enables tracking every action of your learners throughout the course. For example, how quickly 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? As a learning facilitator, you can deduce the appropriate intervals for sending new content to participants and how much time they need for completion.
If your course leaders know how learners behave in the courses, they can offer suitable courses to further improve the individual skills.
4. You get better insights into the learning process
Big Data assists your learning professionals in understanding how learners acquire and process knowledge. The better and deeper your learning facilitators' understanding is, the better the courses they design, and the better learners respond to these courses.
In contrast to point 3, this is primarily about the individual processes and preferences during learning. Does a person learn better with visual stimuli or do they benefit from detailed texts? Can the learner actively apply new knowledge directly, or do they need practical examples? Depending on this, learning facilitators can resort to different media for different learning types and thereby support the individual learning process.
As you can see, Big Data can effectively enhance and simplify your training measures. Large companies that want to remain relevant in the future should better engage with the implementation of Big Data in their training measures. Especially for in-house training, Big Data analysis brings new opportunities that you should not miss!
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