When developing a course for a large audience, the needs assessment will often point to areas where specific content should be presented to certain subsets of the audience – this is called “profiling.” As more and more training moves online, technology and functionality has been developed to allow us to more effectively profile learners, to serve up specific content to disparate audiences, and have all this appear seamlessly to the learner.

Some common examples of profiling include:

• Providing specific language or terms for those in disparate geographic locations.
• Training specific concepts within an overall course to different lines of business.
• Allowing learners who have already mastered certain concepts to “test out” of portions of the training.

The last item on the list, testing out, was the requirement for this project, geared to training treasury account managers.

The project consisted of revamping an existing course, making it SCORM compliant and ready for LMS integration, and adding the profiling mechanism. After completing a needs assessment and identifying the areas where learners may already be familiar with the material, we worked with our client to develop a “pre-assessment.” The pre-assessment included 75 questions, which were divided into topic sections of three questions each. The learner was required to answer at least two of the three questions correctly to test out of that topic.

On the programming side, at the client’s request, we used Trivantis’ Lectora to develop the pre-assessment and assign variables for each question. If a learner gets the required two out of three questions correct, a variable is set. The training’s course map is programmed to show the topics for which a variable was set as “optional.” To recap, the learner completes the pre-assessment, advances to the training, and pulls up the course map – which seamlessly displays which topics are required for the learner and which are optional.

The requirements for this profiling implementation presented some challenges - specifically because of the two-out-of-three equation. We were confident that we would work through to arrive at the solution, which we did, and we delivered the project on time and successfully.

Techniques like profiling bring customization to the eLearning world, and make the course far more versatile when rolling out to a diverse population. Being able to test out is a clear advantage to an eLearning scenario over one that is instructor led.