The past decade has seen an absolute explosion in workflow automation across all sectors. AI is here to stay from ambassador programs in the marketing sector to the rise of digital phone systems for business. We’ve taught our machines to complete crucial tasks while we focus our time on more valuable endeavors, increasing the effectiveness of our operations.
But how exactly does automation work with something as person-specific as learning? This guide explores the benefits of learning automation and digital upskilling and how your organization can take advantage of them so your team reaches their true potential and feels empowered, all the while helping your business scale.
What Is eLearning Automation?
If we’re still a few decades away from robot teachers, as seen on The Jetsons, what does learning automation look like today? At the most basic level, learning automation harnesses AI automation and the power of algorithms to varying degrees to provide personalized training content for each student based on their individual needs.
This personalized content can manifest in many ways in an eLearning course. Here are some fundamental processes where automation works within the eLearning framework:
- Algorithms can provide a unique learning experience for each student by evaluating their answers and providing materials for re-studying based on those they got wrong.
- They can format content, like your explainer videos, for every individual student or provide content to different students depending on their skills, sometimes through a pre-course assessment.
- Algorithms can automate important, regular reports like a student progress report, test scores, engagement scores, or the number and frequency of enrollments.
- Algorithms can send students notifications about important course-related updates such as new assignments, upcoming examinations, or altered course content.
- They can provide customer support to students by answering frequently asked questions or directing them to appropriate resources.
- They can provide immediate feedback and grades to the learner.
- They’re software-based and employ RPA online training (robotic process automation training), so students aren’t tethered to a classroom.
- Algorithms don’t require you to write code since they work in the background to deliver automation results.
The genius of automation, in general, is that machines can learn and make decisions based on past situations they’ve encountered and analyzed. This flexibility in finding solutions can be invaluable to students when applied to eLearning.
How Can Automation Make eLearning Smarter?
As we’ve seen above, automation in the digital classroom can do incredibly intelligent things. The consequences of all this intelligence for your classroom’s eLearning development can lead to some very real benefits for your learners, trainers, and managers. Here are some top benefits of employing eLearning in your classroom:
Personalizes the Learning Experience
In its infinite ability to adapt, automation becomes a unique, personalized mini-teacher to each student – something highly valuable as more and more students study remotely through cloud VoIP phone systems. With the right screen-sharing software, automation can help students feel connected to the larger community and like individuals with specific needs that are being addressed and met.
Event management software also serves as a valuable tech add-on for the remote learning process – being both useful for communication between learning facilitators and also student-facing interactions.
Beyond this, automation helps to assess each student’s needs based on assignment results and overall performance. It then delivers appropriate study material based on this.
Manages Learning More Effectively
By automating your eLearning courses and using cloud-based applications, like Google RPA, trainers can manage students and their needs more effectively wherever they are. Accessing student data instantly means that trainers can be more efficient in determining specific student needs.
Automation helps teachers measure training effectiveness and make informed decisions about training materials, assessments, course requirements, and course scope. By automating this process and doing so successfully based on individual needs, teachers and trainers have more time to increase the overall quality of course material.
Improves Learner Motivation
How can what is essentially a robot increase student motivation and boost overall engagement? Students can be automatically notified of everything from test results to a drop in attendance and receive digital badges for completed assessments. Automated surveys can assess what is captivating in terms of course content and, more importantly, what isn’t.
Automated eLearning provides trainer access to a wide variety of high-quality instructional materials. This means that choosing the best tools to accommodate any student and specific needs is fast and effortless. When students have their needs met quickly, rather than having to wait for a teacher who has to manage several students at once manually, they’re more likely to remain motivated.
Reduces Course Development Time
Reducing the time your team spends on course development can be a great way to cut costs, and automation can help you get there. Automation can assist teams to identify gaps in training or course material more quickly and with less effort. It can track trends to identify course weaknesses or provide customized questionnaires to request student feedback.
You get more time to brainstorm and develop effective instructional design strategies when you automate crucial aspects of course development, such as writing, grading, and providing supplemental materials for assessments.
Ensures Compliance
Training people means gathering and working with sensitive information, and this requires strict adherence to compliance and standards. Automation, like that used in standard GSuite features, creates audit trails to track compliance and spot gaps. Moreover, it can deploy relevant compliance training to increase efficiency and accountability while strengthening your overall culture of compliance.
Automation and eLearning: Final Thoughts
Perhaps not surprisingly, roles have been reversed, and it’s the machines helping us learn. While the thought of strict robot teachers may induce a bit of fear, automation in eLearning is, in reality, a lot less flashy but a lot more revolutionary. Automation can streamline eLearning tasks to make training more effortless and help train people better.
Automation isn’t going anywhere soon, but it’s also no cyber-inspired panacea. Instead, automation in the eLearning environment is a tool that can prove the power of modern tech when guided by the human touch. But this power will always rest ultimately in the decisions made by the team behind the bot.
