Making learning personal
As exam season draws to a close, the sighs of relief are almost audible from children and young people up and down the country. The same is true within BBC Learning’s Bitesize team. For the past nineteen years, they’ve played a key role in helping children across the UK get to grips with the curriculum; supporting learners from reception and primary school age through to secondary level and those taking school-leaving exams.
Bitesize has more than 2m unique browsers a week, which rises to well over 3m during peak exam periods. It has a real impact on young people’s education; 81% of users say it helps them with their schoolwork or homework.
The look of the site has changed considerably over the last nineteen years but its functionality hasn’t yet had the same level of transformation. That’s something we’re planning to change.
Personalisation, delivered through sign-in, is increasingly important across all of the BBC’s digital services. On iPlayer, when you’re signed in, you can receive recommendations and pick up exactly where you left off, even if you change device. BBC Sport lets you keep up to date with the latest news and scores for the teams you love.
Using the same BBC functionality, we want Bitesize to provide a similarly rich, personalised service; one that gives every child in the UK a tailored, structured learning experience to maximise their attainment and achieve their full potential.
We’re going to start Bitesize personalisation initially with our 14–16 year old audience and have already taken some steps through the release of the Bitesize app last year. By introducing sign-in to the website offer, we will make it much easier for them to get straight to the content they need. Alongside sign-in, we are also taking other steps to tailor Bitesize and make the discovery of content as easy as possible — such as ensuring that our revision material is all categorised by exam board and revamping the Bitesize homepage.
For this audience, personalised digital experiences are the norm, so in many ways we’re playing catch-up, and in the longer term we’ll continue to develop Bitesize and explore ways to deliver adaptive learning.
Now we’ve made it a priority, we’re keen to ensure that we meet the expectations of our audience. We’ll let you know how we get on with this transformation and we’d love to hear your thoughts.
