Context matters. Learning in context can help employees understand their discipline and apply the concepts in real life. Learning without context has no meaning and is of no use.
The basic idea behind contextualized learning is that by inserting instructions in contexts that employees are familiar with, understanding and absorbing those instructions become easy. Contextualized learning puts the learning process into the employee’s world of work so that the concepts, theories, and lessons reinforce, and are also reinforced by the employee’s job tasks.
In this digital age, the best way to provide contextual learning or training to employees is through a learning management system or an LMS. With an LMS you can design, create, and launch engaging eLearning courses and content, and set up virtual learning environments. It’s a cost-effective and efficient way to train employees.
In this article, you will get to know more about the following topics:
- Why Use Contextualized Learning Approach?
- What Are The Features Of Contextualized Learning?
- What Are The Strategies To Design and Create Contextualized Learning?
Why Use Contextualized Learning Approach?
1) Pedagogical Theory-
Contextual learning activities support various mainstream pedagogical theories that claim that contextual learning builds the human brain. Motivation theories, social learning theories, problem-centered learning theories, etc, are examples of such theories.
2) Real-world application-
Rather than teaching abstract concepts to employees through theories, contextual learning strategies help organizations prepare their workforce to deal with real-world challenges.
3) Specificity-
Context-based learning means helping employees understand specific concepts that are relevant from the company’s perspective. Hence, eLearning professionals can build eLearning content keeping company-specific context in mind.
4) Speed-
Contextualized learning rejects the traditional “crawl, toddle, walk, run” approach. Instead, it focuses on the big picture and involves only those concepts that are more suitable and usable. As only relevant topics and contexts are involved, the speed of learning increases considerably. This means employees can finish tier training on time.
What Are The Features Of Contextualized Learning?
1) Hands-on experience-
Hands-on experience means “learning by doing”. Employees learn by doing things. When they finish their learning, they try implementing the same knowledge in the real world.
2) Integrated learning-
Integrated learning is all about making connections or drawing relationships between various concepts so that they can be used to solve real-life challenges.
This is very effective for the training of the sales team. You can integrate various tools and technologies into your existing LMS and provide real-life training to employees. How about integrating Virtual Reality (VR) technology into your LMS?
The following are the advantages of integrating VR technology into your LMS:
- Employees can interact directly with the eLearning content. They can extract virtual objects from the screen, watch them carefully, and can also use a stylus pen to make any changes.
- VR creates an immersive and multisensory experience where the employee can touch, hear, and feel everything in the virtual world (it makes the employee feel as if he’s interacting in the real world).
- LMS and VR integration offers employees the opportunity to learn, practice, and excel. For instance, a sales team employee can practice his/her sales pitch in the VR scenario before facing real-life customers or clients.
3) Project-based learning-
Project-based learning is an approach where employees are encouraged to acquire new skills and knowledge, and develop enduring capabilities through eLearning projects. It requires employees to go through a multistage process of design, planning, implementation, group presentation, critique, and online training assessment. The project outcome needs to be solid like a project proposal, research paper, etc.
For instance, the marketing team can be given projects where they’ve to collect information relating to marketing strategies (of oneself, competitors, and successful companies), changing consumer behavior, taste, and preferences, and what challenges may unfold in the future. By understanding the market context through such projects, you can shape your business goals.
4) Active learning-
Active learning is one where employees become an intrinsic part of the learning process. From passive learners, they become active learners. Active learning is all about role-playing activities, game-based learning, etc.
What Are The Strategies To Design and Create Contextualized Learning?
1) Design with the most relevant approach in mind-
There is a range of contextual learning strategies that you can use. Some of them are skills-based, knowledge-based, and cognitive approaches. Make sure that you select the strategy that’s most suitable for your employees. For instance, while a cognitive approach might work in one context, it may not work in another context.
2) Design for effectiveness-
Merely providing employees with eLearning resources or courses to impart new skills and knowledge isn’t enough to achieve a learning objective. You need to focus on designing the course and content framework as well so that employees don’t feel bored and disconnected from the real substance. Teach them processes and procedures so that they can apply the learned skills in a given context effectively.
For instance, providing only theoretical knowledge isn’t sufficient for the customer support service team to tackle clients and customers. You need to teach them processes, procedures, and tactics to deal with customers patiently.
3)Design for transference-
Employees’ positions and responsibilities keep changing with time. They are promoted and transferred, and their positions change laterally or horizontally within the organization.
If you’re providing contextualized learning to employees, then you need to ensure that your employees are able to transfer and adapt their knowledge, skills, and experiences to the new environment they move in. Restricting one’s knowledge to one specific context won’t allow employees to grow.
4) Design with social consciousness-
Today, almost every organization holds a diverse and global workforce. The employees have different cultural and social roots. Thus, it is imperative that when designing contextualized learning activities as part of the eLearning course, you take these social factors into account.
Wondering why? You need to ensure that nobody in your organization is made to feel small or differentiated on their cultural grounds. When employees from different cultural backgrounds are assigned one common eLearning project, then you need to ensure that they work as a team and not as different individuals.
Using a multilingual LMS you can support the learning needs of employees who speak, read and write different languages.
5) Design assessments appropriately-
If you want to evaluate the contextual learning of employees, then you need to design online training assessments appropriately. For instance, a branching scenario can be used to test how an employee would respond in a specific situation.
6) Design for groups-
The best contextual learning strategy is one that is designed keeping in mind the group learners as opposed to focusing on one learner. This is because your employees will have to interact and work with their colleagues, team managers supervisors, and other members in the real world.
Group learning offers various notable advantages like learning from peers, developing good communication skills, teamwork, leadership, etc.
Conclusion
Contextualized learning is the need of the hour and it helps you create a future-ready workforce. By future-ready workforce we mean, a workforce that can tackle all the challenges in the future and apply their knowledge and skills in a specific context appropriately.
