5 Ways Open LMS’s Personalized Learning Designer (PLD) Enhances Online Education

As online learning becomes an essential part of education in general, institutions face a major challenge: how to offer a personalized, cutting-edge, quality educational experience.

Personalization in education has become more important than ever—so much so that UNESCO has stated that personalized learning should be a key goal in any education system. This is especially true in digital environments, where the natural interactions and dynamics of a face-to-face classroom tend to be lost.

Open LMS has the perfect tool for creating personalized learning experiences in an automated way: it’s called PLD (Personalized Learning Designer).

Developed by Open LMS, PLD enables teachers and administrators to automate course elements in order to personalize student learning based on their interactions. As a result, organizations and institutions can tailor eLearning according to the needs and requirements of their learners.

PLD can adapt to a wide range of use cases. In this article, we list the five most common cases we’ve encountered with our Open LMS EDU customers and how PLD successfully solves them.

1. Assisting Instructors

In personalized learning, the instructor’s job goes beyond just sharing knowledge. They work with students to ensure that they’re comprehending the information, as well as design individualized strategies to help them progress. In addition, they must continue to monitor students, check their assignments, and verify that they log in regularly, among other activities.

Faced with so many tasks, instructors would benefit from a tool that can automate many of these processes (which are usually performed manually). With the use of PLD, teachers can create rules such as sending feedback based on the results of each learner, creating alerts for follow-up, and sending personalized emails to students, among many others. In short, PLD works as a personal assistant for teachers.

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2. Accompanying Learners During the Learning Process

Online education is mostly performed individually. Each learner is free to join their classes from the place and time that suits them best, as long as they abide by the course’s parameters.

However, in virtual education, an instructor can’t be available 24 hours a day or every time a learner is online. As a consequence, something as simple as welcoming a user at the beginning of a course becomes logistically complicated.

Automated rules can be set up in the PLD tool so that learners receive a personalized welcome message as soon as they start a course, for example. The message can then redirect them to an activity of the instructor’s choice, as well as give instructions on what to do when accessing the course for the first time. Thus, students don’t feel alone while using the system, or that there’s no one to assist them.

3. Personalizing Learning

Not everyone learns at the same speed. Each person progresses through a course in their own way and at their own pace. A customizable LMS must have the capacity to accommodate their individuality during learning.

Here are some examples of how the PLD tool can automatically personalize learning for each user:

• PLD redirects users to study groups if they fail at any point in the course.
• It sends suggestions for new content or courses related to their current learning.
• PLD can suggest extra materials based on the user’s interests or performance.
• It accelerates a user’s learning path based on quiz and activity scores.

In addition, the tool helps with the development of customized paths that go beyond a single course. Students can be automatically enrolled or assigned to new courses through diagnostic training or based on their performance at the end of a course.

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4. Maintaining Learner Engagement

Participation in digital environments often represents a major challenge for both corporate organizations and educational institutions. It’s more difficult to encourage engagement when course members aren’t together in the same place and at the same time.

Different rules can be created with PLD to keep learners engaged during their studies, as well as invite them to log in regularly.

PLD can verify events such as:

• User logins
• Completed assignments
• Performance development during the course
• User participation in forums

These events can be used to create automatic actions within the course. For example, the system can send an email notification to the learner if they haven’t logged in for more than three days. Similarly, PLD can send invites to participate in a forum if the user hasn’t already done so, or can remind them to submit an assignment 24 hours before the due date.

In addition to maintaining constant participation, these alerts are of great help to the users, given that they encourage learning and give consistency to the course. They also help to create good study habits.

5. Giving Feedback

Feedback in online education goes beyond giving learners their scores on a quiz or an activity. If a learner is failing a course, they will need advice and suggestions on the path to take to improve and achieve their objectives. The same is the case with positive feedback, which is equally valuable because it can create incentives or badges that increase learner motivation.

PLD helps to ensure constant feedback. By creating rules, teachers can send comments, advice, or suggestions based on learner performance. This way, online education is no longer just about receiving files with information and answering related questions. Instead, guided and personalized learning is in place throughout the course.

A Powerful Tool for Your LMS

One of the main goals of Open LMS is to provide innovative educational solutions. Our team of global experts ensures that your organization or educational institution can deliver a great online training and learning experience. The PLD tool is one of our key differentiators as an open-source LMS based on Moodle™.

It’s important to note that Open LMS offers workshops and webinars so that your team (both instructors and administrators) can fully use the capabilities of PLD. We know that your institution is unique, so we work with you to ensure that your LMS meets all your needs.