How to use learning personas to make your eLearning more customized

The more individually a learning offer is tailored to the respective person, the more successful their learning process will be. Logically, someone who learns at the individually right time, intrinsically motivated, with the individually right methods and formats, can absorb new knowledge much faster than a person who may not even know exactly what they need the new knowledge for in the first place. Accordingly, efforts are being made to individualize e-learning offerings more and more in order to ultimately not only promote competencies, satisfaction and corporate loyalty, but also to save valuable resources in the long term. But individualization requires information about each individual person. Or!? In this article, you will read how to use so-called learner personas to lay the foundation for individualized e-learning and how to use them to adapt old and new e-learning offerings for individual learners in the future.

You are probably already familiar with the buzzwords target group analysis and buyer personas from marketing. Both principles can also be applied in e-learning: 

In a target group analysis, (potential) customers are grouped together through empirical collection based on their demographic, socio-economic and psychographic characteristics, buying behavior and media usage. The challenge here is to abstract the groups as far as possible in such a way that a certain heterogeneity results - a multitude of individuals is thus reduced to their common attributes. The most popular criteria: Age, relationship status, place of residence, income - depending on the particular product/service being sold. 

The advantage of a target group analysis is that interested parties with similar characteristics can easily be addressed together - but this is also precisely its disadvantage: messages may no longer do justice to individual persons, individuality is lost. Depending on the abstraction, this effect is so strong that messages even reach people outside the target group. In this case, one speaks of so-called scattering loss.

But when we think about eLearning, we know that we can't afford wastage - after all, wastage of just one person means that they won't be successful in learning and may not complete the training at all. So a simple target group analysis among learners is not enough. What is needed is a deeper understanding of learners and their needs, so that the learning process can be tailored not just to the average learner, but to each individually.

The solution to this is the so-called learner personas in marketing aka. buyer personas. Instead of creating a group as heterogeneous as possible, one, better several fictitious archetypes are created. These have not only the characteristics that are captured in the target group analysis, but also a name, a face, a biography, a character. Nevertheless, these characteristics are still based on real facts. The goal is to enable such a high degree of identification and empathy in this way that a change of perspective succeeds and one can view e-learning offerings from the perspective of the respective person. So how would Manuela like the course? When can Manuela concentrate best? Surely not during working hours, when her phone rings every 5 minutes, right? And shouldn't Manuela - as an auditory learning type - rather be provided with audio files instead of texts?

Because, of course, it is still not possible to consider all employees individually, ideally several archetypes should be created, each representing as small a group as possible with as many commonalities as possible. Important: However, one or two Lerner Personas are better than none at the beginning - so don't be afraid to start simple! You can also expand the list of learner personas later.

But where exactly can learner personas be applied anyway? A look at the different areas of application helps to better understand what data matters and how broadly a learner persona can provide insight into learners.

Generally, the more information you have, the more refined the picture of your persona will be, the easier it will be to take their perspective, and the better the learning experience can be tailored. Because the fictional persona, as mentioned at the outset, is an archetype of real people groups in your organization (unlike in marketing, where a persona depicts a*future ideal customer), you have all internal sources of information at your disposal to map the learner persona as realistically as possible.

Once the learner personas are created, the real work begins: individualizing the e-learning offering – to match the different archetypes you've identified in your organization. Take the perspective of your persona and look at the learning offering from their point of view:

• How would Manuela find the course? 
• Which elements and formats would Manuela enjoy?
• When and where would Manuela learn?
• Would Manuela rather learn in small bites or in a coherent way?
• Does Manuela understand the chosen language?

The next step is to adapt the learning content to fit your answers. But don't worry: What at first sounds like an almost insurmountable challenge is supported by professional authoring tools and learning management systems with so-called "adaptation features" 

In simple terms, Adaptions Features allow learning content, once created, to be easily adapted to different archetypes. So instead of creating courses from scratch for each persona, they are simply adapted – that is, different versions are created to fit each "persona". In the case of Knowledgeworker Create, adaptation features available include: