Allowing Adult Students to Change Learning Paths and Difficulty Levels in Online Courses

“Luke, look into your crystal ball and tell me what do you see for the future of online learning and higher education?” I think my answer might surprise you. Yes, I too dream of XR, the Metaverse, and other pieces of technology that will wow and amaze us all, but I’m also a realist. I don’t think I need to tell you that it’s incredibly hard for people to accept change. You don’t need to be a neuroscientist to know that change is a slow and steady process. For every cool and amazing piece of tech, I expect it to take years to finally reach the online classroom . There will also undoubtedly be issues with accessibility and access. Many institutions today though still offer online courses the way they were created in the early 2000s with their courses comprising of only readings, discussion boards, and essays. It’s silly to me to dream of futuristic wonders when the general population still confuses online learning and remote learning. As an instructor and instructional designer, I’d rather set my sights on something I can control right now and dedicate more human effort to improve the online learning experience for all.

One fact that I’ve come to accept with education is that students come into our classes with different levels of prior knowledge and expectations. No two students are exactly going to be on the same wave length and it takes incredible instructors to understand where everyone is coming from and then to support each student for their particular need. While this is a monumental task to do in a synchronous setting, it’s also ridiculously hard to do this in an asynchronous environment. The warning signs that students are struggling aren’t apparent until the student submits their work (or doesn’t) or reaches out to the instructor. From there, instructors need to explore why exactly the students are having a hard time. It might be because the content is too challenging, but it also could very well be that students don’t find the content relevant for their needs. Perhaps they enrolled in an online course for professional development purposes, but the content and the delivery method aren’t relevant for their line of work. Maybe the problem is neither of these, and the issue is simply that they can’t find the time to go back to school.

Online instructors are essentially detectives who try and solve the mystery of why are students struggling. Learning analytics can help, but data doesn’t tell the full story. The typical strategies involve sending emails, responding to discussion boards, posting announcements, leaving feedback on rubrics, hosting office hours, and even texting and calling students. This is a long way of saying that there has to be some communication between the students and the online instructors about how to provide the right type of support. However, not every student feels comfortable with reaching out for help and some never respond. What if some of the normal barriers within online learning could be removed? What if we, as instructional designers and instructors, could give adult students more power and flexibility with the delivery of the online learning experience?

So, what’s the idea?

Let’s take a step back. I want you to reimagine a course as a video game. After you get through the loading screen and create your character, there is a menu to adjust how the game looks and feels. You’ll see options for changing the brightness of the screen, turning off and on captions, being able to skip cinematic scenes, and there is this special functionality called, “the difficulty level.” This allows you, as the gamer, to toggle between different levels such as novice, medium, and expert. It’s safe to say that most gamers start off with the standard setting of medium to test out the waters the way the developers had intended. If you go through the game and find the right balance between challenge and fun, you continue with that setting. If you lose several times in a row and become discouraged, you can adjust the difficulty to be easier. Some games are adaptive where a prompt will pop up asking the gamer if they want to drop the difficulty because it seems like they are having a hard time. Without these functions, more and more gamers would quit over their frustration of performing poorly . Sure, there will be some gamers who will try harder, watch YouTube videos for step-by-step guides, and reach out to their friends for guidance, but if all of those efforts are in vein, the game will go back on the shelf and continue to collect dust.

The other major factor that some of the best video games provide is not just changing the difficulty, but allowing gamers to “choose their own adventure.” Do you want to play as an evil character, a good character, or a neutral character? Your actions and dialogue within the game will completely change the ending. Games like Skyrim and Fallout are well known for giving the ultimate control to the gamer and allowing them to decide their own fate. This freedom of choice greatly increases the chances of gamer playing the same video game again and again because they want to unlock more paths and discover what happens when they make different decisions. The games that only have one way of playing with one storyline can make gamers frustrated as they don’t identify with the main character’s choices. They crave the flexibility to choose their own path and to see the results.

Think about what you just read, but translate this into the online learning environment. Online students can try to get better with each submission yet become discouraged. They could go to office hours and seek out tutors, but still not get it. They could reach out to a learning community, but still struggle with implementing the suggestions. They could connect with their advisors, but still find the course work daunting. What if they could toggle the difficulty level of the course to drop from a medium level to a novice level? When they feel prepared and ready, they could then make the adjustment to bump up the difficulty.

Or maybe, the difficulty of the content isn’t the issue, but it’s that they can’t choose their own adventure. They were hoping to learn about the course’s topics in one context, but instead, the content went into a different direction. Maybe they were hoping to learn about more real-world problems, but they only covered theories. Regardless of the issue, after so many tries, students quit. Gamers can simply shut off the video game and never look back. For adult students in higher education or those taking professional development programs, they can withdraw from the course or abandon the idea entirely of going back to school. Adult students should have more control over their learning paths. By giving them the option to change essentially the trajectory and the difficulty of the learning experience, I have a feeling that they would be more inclined to stay in the course and find more ways to enjoy the content.

How would this work?

Let’s say that I’ve designed and taught a graduate level marketing course for a few terms. Every single term, I’m confident in saying that the students come into the course with different levels of expectations. They are asked during first week of the course to go into the discussion board, introduce themselves, say why they are taking the course, and talk about what they hope to learn about. Usually, a third of the students say they want to learn more about entrepreneurship, another third say they want to be a marketer for a major organization, and the final third are uncertain about what they want to do, but they find marketing intriguing. Knowing that this is the case, I can prepare a variety of marketing materials, activities, and assessments based on separate tracks. One would be an entrepreneur’s perspective, one would be from an organization’s perspective, and one would be a blend. While the goals of the assignment are the same, the content, the scenarios, the case studies, the examples, and other details are customized for what students are looking to learn about.

For instance, let’s take the topic of trying to build an email list and capture emails. For the entrepreneur, they would focus on their super power of being a small brand and by offering services that significantly larger organizations can’t replicate. They would practice creating messaging that is captivating for their audience and try to find the angle that sells the idea on why someone should join their email list. They would read case studies of how individuals made their first steps towards growing their brand. They would listen to podcast episodes of entrepreneurs talking about which email provider is best and why. For the individual looking to work for a marketing team at an organization, the goal is creating the email list is the same, but they approach is different. Selling an organization’s products and services has a completely different feel. They aren’t going to offer a chance for one-on-one coaching, but instead, they could host a contest with a prize at the end or offer discounts with special coupon codes. Undoubtedly, the content would shift to meet their needs, but the goal is the same.

As someone who has taught marketing courses for years, I’ve had to manually do this. My announcements are directed towards different segments of my class for what they are trying to focus on. I’ll supply podcasts and additional readings that highlight the entrepreneur’s approach vs the team member’s approach. Even highlighting what’s happening in the world today with how major brands have pivoted their ways of marketing with the pandemic has become material to use in the class. What if I could build this though in the course itself?

In theory, students can choose which learning path to follow. This is what it would look like from the instructor’s / instructional designer’s view:

This image shows the flow chart for how to assign learners using tags. The tag being shown assigns one learner to the entrepreneurship path.

Students could pick their own designated paths by using a system of tags. As the instructor or instructional designer, I can assign the specific content, activities, and assessments to the appropriate tags. This in turn, creates a connected learning experience while hyper focusing on the student’s interest and their goals. This also doesn’t mean that they have to stay on these paths the whole time. If I want students to pick a path after Week 1, follow that path until Week 4, and then have them come back together to meet with students from the other paths to talk about their experiences in Week 5, I can do this. Hearing one another’s perspectives will only help them to grow, but this separate learning path will speak to their interests at the same time.

On top of all of this, I can build separate learning paths based on the level of difficulty. This could mean more or fewer assignments, page length differences, assignment-based differences (individual vs team), etc. For instance, if the students all filled out a pre-assessment at the beginning of the course, it could provide a suggestion on which path and difficulty level to choose. A student who has 5 years of experience being an entrepreneur would have a different path compared to a student just learning about entrepreneurship. These difficulty levels and paths will certainly vary depending upon the program, the content, the instructor, the students, and more.

This flexibility, to me, could go into the student support realm. There will always be students who are superstars in the course and want more of a challenge, which this can provide. On the opposite end, there will always be students that need more support and encouragement. Not only could I adjust the materials and exercises, but in theory, I would even change my tone of voice to offer different levels of support. From my years of academic advising and coaching students through their online programs, I found myself encouraging students in their own unique ways and this resonated with them more. Someone who is struggling with not only the content, but time management issues and other commitments, appreciate more self-check ins and motivational words of encouragement. This doesn’t mean that I wouldn’t provide those concepts for someone with more experience taking online courses, but it does mean that my tone of voice and how I phrase my words would change. So, picking and choosing a certain difficulty level would unlock specific content, and would look like this:

The flow chart has multiple tags for one of the learners. It now has the tag entrepreneurship and the medium difficulty tag.

Now, as you are noticing, these are screenshots. I didn’t create these in Photoshop. What I’m saying is that you can indeed do this right now! This isn’t some form of futuristic thinking, it’s literally possible today. The learning platform/LMS, that I’ve been building on to do this is Eduflow. I’ve used just about every LMS you can think of within higher education, and Eduflow is the only one I’ve found that’s been able to do exactly what I want.

How does this work in the real-world?

The funniest thing about all of this is that this blog post / podcast episode was meant to be more theoretical in nature. I was going to describe this flexibility idea about learning paths and difficulty levels and hoping that someday, maybe it would be a possibility. Then I talked to William Cronje, superstar behind Eduflow’s Instructional Design Principles for Course Creation (IDPCC), and I found out that he was already using these learning paths within IDPCC. This is a course designed to teach the fundamentals of instructional design for all learners. At the start of this course, learners choose their own track and this unlocks different kinds of discussions related to their industry. You can see a screenshot of what this looks like in the live course:

A screenshot of instructional design learners picking the tag they identify with. The tags in this case are for K-12, Higher Education, Corporate, Government, and Non-profit.

While this doesn’t go into further branching with difficulty levels, in theory, there is nothing to stop this from expanding to more areas. For example, William could introduce a tag that will unlock loads of “read more” components for the participants who already have a firm grasp of the basics, but want to dig into the theory. Either way, it was fantastic to hear from someone already implementing this idea in a live course that has had tremendous success with thousands of learners.

What’s the catch?

While I love this idea, I would be naïve to say that it will work for everyone and for every case. Once again, I’m a realist, so let’s talk about limitations. First and foremost, this will take ample time and will need a serious commitment to the course design process. It already takes a great deal of time to design a high-quality online course, and now, this would mean adding in more features. As someone who has worked in higher education as an academic advisor, an instructor, and an instructional designer, I see the value in this flexibility learning path / difficulty idea though. For years, I’ve had to customize and manually adapt to many aspects of online learning when I receive feedback from students. I kept on wishing that I could somehow fix this in a more organized and collective manner so this would indeed solve my problems. To now go and implement this idea in all of my courses, though, would take a considerable amount of time and effort. Also, I would need another set of eyes to also review my work and to help with the QA process. I would also test these ideas with a pilot program to see if they truly do what I’m hoping to achieve. If I can make this work with one item at a time, I can then further scale up and make this a known feature within the online programs.

When I think about who should really tackle this head on and give it a try, it would be an organization that has the structure, the stability, the drive, and the innovation to take their courses and programs even further. This would be ideal for an org that has good programs and wants to make them great. Could it be used in an individual case with just one instructor or one ID? Sure. Nothing would stop you from accomplishing this, but also think like a realist. You’ll need the support from your leadership team to try this and to give you the autonomy to figure out the best way to use it within your parameters. My recommendation would be to start small and replicate what William and the Eduflow team have already done within IDPCC. Select one series of activities to have different tags and iterate to introduce more customizable options.

Overall folks, this is one more tool to put into your tool belt. It’s not a one-size-fits-all solution, but it’s another step in the right direction to make online learning great. By using this and a combination of best practices within teaching and instructional design, this could be a real game changer.

Stay nerdy out there.

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