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3 questions to ask your audience to customise your e-learning training
For a tailor-made experience, knowing your audience is essential. The first question to ask when designing a digital training is – who is the learning path for?
This critical question is too often overlooked for other more attractive issues of the project such as the choice of media. For example – “Will we propose a role-playing game, a serious game or virtual reality?”.
Don’t worry, there’s always time to look into these aspects later! If there was to be only one question asked to the learners concerned, it would be about their expectations.
The tone, the pedagogical approach and the content will be different for pet store staff, veterinarians, Veterinary Specialized Auxiliary (ASV) or breeders.
Who is the typical learner for your training?
Start by defining as precisely as possible the characteristics of your typical learner. Interview your target if you can – it’s a very effective tool for creating personas. Start with demographics:
- Is your audience more male or female?
- What is their average age?
- What are their cultural backgrounds?
Learning is a personal mechanism. Demographics will allow you to adapt your speech or illustrations and thus make your approach more engaging, and therefore more impactful.
What are your audience’s digital capabilities?
Ask yourself how comfortable your learners are with the computer as a tool and online training solutions.
- Are they connected people, accustomed to new technologies?
- How, where and when will the course be viewed?
- Which hardware will be used? PC, MAC, tablet, smartphone?
All of these questions will allow you to adapt the shape of your educational journey, from screen resolution to the choice of design and interactions.
What are the motivations and the degree of knowledge of your audience?
It is important to refrain from unnecessarily repeating elements that your learners have acquired beforehand.
- What is the level of knowledge assumed at the beginning of the training?
- What are the personal motivations and goals of your learners?
- What common mistakes does your audience make?
- How will they implement their achievements at the end of the training course in their professional life?
Put yourself in the shoes of your audience to strengthen the motivational levers at work in your educational journey!
Note:
If you realise during your analysis that your training project aims to engage two very different audiences, such as veterinarians and ASVs for example, you have a couple of different options:
- You can choose to formulate a training path with overlapping areas. Your training may be a little less personalised, but sometimes you have to deal with budgetary realities.
- You could consider having two different projects. The training path will be more relevant, and your training will be all the more effective!
Focus on free navigation within the digital training platform
The option of free navigation for your learners is the key to personalising their experience.
Internet browsing has given the general public a need to feel free all the time. With the advent of new mobile technologies, we are now used to consuming fragmented information, available anywhere and at any time of the day. Partitioning your audience into rigid and forced navigation would be counterproductive.
Make navigation flexible and simple with clear modules. . Give your learner the feeling of being free in their learning journey!
Be free to go at your own pace
The specialisation of professions in the animal health sector leads to different demands for training. Free navigation allows specialised people to navigate directly to the most complex parts. On the other hand, your learners will appreciate having the freedom to revisit a module or to revisit a point that they have more difficulty assimilating.
E-learning has a great ability to adapt to everyone’s rhythm, enjoy it!
Be free to explore different ways of understanding
Make your learners involved in their online training – they will assimilate their new knowledge more easily. Give them challenges and let them explore the learning journey freely, looking for the right content to take on the challenge!
Solving problems will help them understand in concrete terms how training will make their lives easier or how it will help them achieve their goals. This is the best way to learn!
Be alerted to essential information
Remember that you will need to keep control over the movements of your learners within the e-learning platform. Make certain regulatory information mandatory, for example. If you think that elements need to be acquired, alert your learners, and let them know that they may miss out on essential concepts. However, always give them a choice – they will lose motivation if they are forced to revisit concepts that have already been assimilated.
Always keep in mind the main objective of the training – the learner must acquire new knowledge, perhaps a technical understanding or become familiar with a process. You owe it to the learner to facilitate this acquisition, that’s your mission!
You now have all of the key points to customise the experience of your e-learning training in the animal health sector. You can now concentrate on organising the modules for your training, or on the most effective way to offer your training, whether it be a presentation, e-learning or blended-learning.
At Wolf Learning Consulting, we are a 100% specialised agency in the training of the animal health sector. We apply our own knowledge of the sector to benefit our customers.
Come and discover our agency that will accompany you in your training strategy with turnkey solutions!
Do you have a training project in the pipeline? Let’s discuss it today!
