Scaling Community and Personalized Feedback in Online Learning Platforms

Thanks to the pandemic, more people than ever before have discovered the many benefits of online learning. The mass move to online learning has also shone a harsh, unflattering fluorescent light on the gaps in existing online learning technology. 

Feedback and Community in Personal Learning

When delivering learning experiences at scale, two components of learning tend to get sacrificed: feedback and community. Platforms that enable a sense of community with social networks don’t offer enough features to personalize learning or provide helpful feedback. More robust LMSs built for enterprise or institutional use are unwieldy and make interpersonal connections and socialization difficult. 

In educational or corporate learning environments, addressing these gaps in learning platforms often means fastening together a mix of different solutions—in many cases, this works well, especially when put together by expert learning experience designers. 

But for coaches and teachers who work with learners in non-professional and non-academic settings, delivering a learning experience with many different platforms is almost always less than ideal. Course creators are already trying to accomplish two big goals at once: delivering effective learning experiences AND running a business. It’s no wonder that so many course creators look to one-stop-shop course platforms that allow them to accomplish both goals with one tool. 

The reality of most online course platforms is that they are really marketing platforms, a way to distribute content to many people at once. Hardly any of them allow even the option to give personalized feedback to learners, and most don’t foster a sense of community beyond discussion forums. 

Craving Connection

Truly self-directed learners may not need or want feedback or community when learning something for fun. But many others crave that connection between themselves, the content, the instructor, and their peers. That connection is what keeps them coming back, continuing to learn—and with consistency come results. If you’re a business owner, returning students mean two things: validation that the learning experiences you are delivering are valuable, and the viability of your business. 

As a learning professional with experience designing and delivering learning experiences in person and online for K-12, higher education, corporate, and personal development contexts, I know that there will never be a one-size-fits-all learning platform that meets the needs of all learning stakeholders. 

However, I’m excited about the emergence of solutions to some of the most glaring problems in online learning in each of these categories—solutions like Oluko, a brand new online course platform for coaches and experts who want to build a business delivering transformative learning experiences to an engaged community of learners. Being able to deliver personalized, asynchronous feedback to learners and foster peer-to-peer connections are within reach—this innovation resulting from our experiences over the past year is certainly a silver lining of a global pandemic.