This article is the first of a 3-part article series about differentiated instruction.
One of the important goals of your corporate virtual classroom is to provide a learning environment that facilitates the highest knowledge retention. This will allow employees involved in the training program to gain the new skills and knowledge updates that will enable them to improve their productivity at work.
The thing is, not two learners are alike. That is a challenge that elearning professionals have to deal with. You need to be able to create one elearning course that can cater to the different learning preferences of the employees. You need to be able to address the differences in their learning needs.
This is where differentiated instruction comes into play. This is how you can implement various methods of online training that will help the different employees who will access your virtual classroom. It is admittedly, a time-consuming task for elearning professional – but it is very effective in reaching out to a variety of employees in the organization.
What differentiated instruction does is focus on the different learning paths that your audience have. When you consider this in your training program, you can help employees get better engagement, training outcomes and motivation as they try to reach whatever goals they have in joining the course. If you help employees achieve their goals through the elearning course, they become better workers and that contributes to the overall success of the company.
Now the question here is, what elements should you incorporate in your virtual classroom in order to implement differentiated instruction? Here are some suggestions that may be worth looking into.
- It should allow employees to begin at different areas in the training content. That way, some employees can skip certain portions of the course and learn at their own pace. This will make the learning process faster for some employees. It can be beneficial for those who are in a hurry to finish the training course and cannot wait for the other employees to finish with them. It will also enable you to use one course for employees with different foundations in their training.
- It should provide different approaches in online training. People have different preferences in learning. Usually, this coincides with their personality and strengths. For instance, musically inclined people get higher retention if you incorporate audio in your presentations, videos, etc. Then there are those who are attracted to visually stimulating approaches. You need to consider how you can incorporate this in your virtual classroom.
- It should allow different work outputs from employees. This is simply providing participants with a variety of training assignments that will allow them to submit different work products. This will make the creation of the elearning course quite time-consuming as you need to identify the right classification for each group of employees and assign the appropriate activity for them. This will involve some thorough research but it should be all worth it because it allow you to train employees based on their strengths.
Take note that you do not have to use all of these – you can use one or combine two.
The truth is, differentiated instruction will make your virtual classroom a bit more complicated to create. But if you do it correctly, you will find that one course can help you train different kinds of employees – regardless of their previous experience, background and preferences.
In the next part of this article series, we will be discussing the different strategies that you can use in creating a differentiated instruction for your elearning course.
This article is inspired by the study done by Kathleen Scalise (Assistant Professor, University of Oregon EDUCAUSE Information Resources Library, January 2000). The original text can be found on this link: http://net.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/csd4903.pdf
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