Regardless of your industry, if you’re an entrepreneur, HR manager, workforce trainer or other professional involved in developing employees, it’s important that you keep yourself up to date on the different trends affecting how training is offered and the results it achieves.

In particular, online learning is bigger and better than ever and should be utilized by all companies. This type of learning saves money, time and energy, is more scalable, gives businesses access to the brightest minds and best speakers from around the world and has numerous other benefits.

No matter what kinds of training programmes you want to provide for your employees, such as an online MBA or leadership degree, computer programming development, speaker training or something specialized for your industry, you will find eLearning can be of benefit. Thus, you need to stay current in the area of online learning and understand what’s new and improved as well as the direction training is going. To help you with this, read on for some of the key online learning trends of the day.

Gamification

After the success of various learning games, it’s no wonder gamification has caught the attention of trainers everywhere. People of all ages and backgrounds are drawn in by the fun and challenges of gaming, so it stands to reason that this tactic is perfect for learning.

Gamification helps people retain knowledge better and to understand things more concretely. With the younger generations, such as millennials, having grown up using video games, they’re particularly drawn to learning that involves some aspect of play.

If you’re designing training programmes for your staff members at the moment, or plan to soon, you should note that gamification is suited to students who struggle with traditional learning strategies. After all, everyone learns in different ways, so it’s important to make different styles of learning available.

Gamification is also helpful because it allows people to make mistakes as they learn with no pressures about success rates or about recrimination for not getting things right the first time. In turn, this helps people learn from their mistakes as they go.

AI and Automation

We’re constantly seeing artificial intelligence (AI) and automation change industries left, right and center so, again, it’s no surprise that these technologies are having an impact in the area of eLearning. Tech is getting smarter and more sophisticated all the time, so it will soon be used by trainers and developers when they design programmes, implement, test, and evaluate them as well as modify them over time.

One prime example of AI used in online learning is through virtual teaching assistants. Today, these are being increasingly used to generate and deliver content to students as well as to communicate with them along the way and to provide support when required. AI is of great benefit to students who are falling behind in their studies since it can be used to help people focus on particular tasks or topics they’re struggling with.

As for automation, a big plus for eLearning professionals is that technology can automate many parts of the creation and assessment of programmes. There is a lot of educational software designed to reduce the time required to put courses together and to lower the costs of implementing programmes.

Micro Learning

Another big online learning trend is what’s known as “micro learning.” This refers to courses and training broken down into small, bite-sized chunks of information (such as 10-, 20-, 30- or 60-minute sessions), rather than longer programmes.

By having access to short, sharp, focused lessons, students can fit in learning around their life and work. They don’t have to try to scramble to find hours to study; they can instead do a little bit here and there as they have the time and head space.

This makes sense considering how busy people are and how much many people struggle with short attention spans. Helpfully, with micro learning, employees can take in information better because they only have to focus for a small stretch of time. In addition, this type of training is beneficial for people with learning difficulties.

Tiffany Rowe is the Marketing Administrator at Seek Visibility.