AI And eLearning Development
The past four years represent a 270% growth in AI among businesses. Industry leaders and organization heads are now embracing the use of AI—and also noting how machines and robotics make work easier and open up businesses to new and unimagined possibilities.
According to a 2019 Gartner Report, 15% of global customer service will shift to AI’s hands by 2021. However, this prediction may just have understated the potential growth of AI in businesses—with the impacts of the pandemic and the shift to at-home working. The statistics and predictions can shake you if you are not prepared for the massive changes to AI. Truth be told, nobody is ready for what is to come. But rather than fear the automation of jobs, employees can gain and benefit and learn to work alongside AI to realize their maximum potential.
This is where AI in custom eLearning, training, and development comes in. Here are just a couple of ways Artificial Intelligence promises to improve your employees’ lives and possibly maintain worker retention. These will heavily rely on both proprietary and open source machine learning frameworks.
Adopting AI Into Custom eLearning, Training, And Development
Before we head any further, you have to realize that your employees, in this case, are the customers. AI promises the deliverables—with a methodology that is subtle and non-invasive. Rather than a one-size-fits-all eLearning program, AI seeks to personalize content based on employee profile, experience, learning style, learner’s behavior, and learning curve. When you think of personalization, think about Amazon or Netflix and how they personalize their recommendations to suit your preferences.
AI achieves this through adaptive learning, where the virtual trainer switches to the most appropriate method for the user. This could translate to a gamified User Experience, guided presentations, in-person training, video experience, or written content based on the learner’s best approach. The AI will also issue tests and online quizzes based on the employees’ learning curve and capabilities and offer personalized feedback on areas where the worker needs to upskill.
Online courses, in general, tend to be a slippery slope with declining course completion rates. And declining course completions could be due to a variety of factors: the difficulty of the course, time constraints, poor course design, other priorities, and more. Applying AI to courses seeks to enhance the completion rates by removing irrelevant content and presenting the employee’s training and development program in a more personalized way to engage the employee. With time, AI understands the user’s weaknesses and strengths—based on in-course quizzes, answer verbiage, time spent on questions, and more—hence offering better-structured training courses and modules that last for shorter spans. In the long run, this dramatically improves completion rates, and that should lead to better productivity. Now, does it…is a different question.
Eliminating Bias
Another advantage of AI in custom eLearning development is its ability to eliminate bias. Most of the time, appraisals and employee promotion follow a biased process that favors a particular crew of workers. Objectivity is the name of the game when it comes to AI. An unbiased AI system can factor in persons with disabilities (such as Microsoft’s Seeing AI app), language translation through multiple captioning tracks, and impartial L&D processes based on hard data and results.
A successful L&D campaign involves an initial research phase to come up with the best content, which is tedious at best. A well-trained AI system seeks to minimize this burden by automating the content creation process or effortlessly searching out filtered material from the internet. As AI does a lot of the heavy lifting, the training becomes fun, and the preparation on the part of the trainers becomes manageable.
AI breaches the gap brought in where trainers fail to reach out to the individual on a personal level through digital tutors. The digital tutor can meet the user at their learning point and flow with their pace using relevant content. Moreover, AI can upskill the workers’ morale and motivation by linking employees to mentors and monitoring the mentoring process. This allows proactivity in the workplace where the L&D team is able to combine relevant training tools with the available knowledge resource base for the best performance.
Eventually, embracing AI, the institution will realize better performance from the employees, which translates to satisfied customers, gradually improved ROI on L&D processes, and more profits for the company and shareholders. The trick is to use Artificial Intelligence constructively and be flexible to the changing nature of the stakeholders. Be ready to think outside the box with AI. The question is, are you ready?
