Why Assessments are a Core Part of Learning
At Knowledge Officer, we wanted to help people achieve their career goals by building the shortest and most efficient learning paths that give them the necessary skills to realize their dreams. To be able to do that, we knew that we needed to have continuous feedback loops that inform our learning paths and guide the learners to the right paths for them.
Let’s take one step back first and talk about a non-learning related topic: Transportation! You are now going into a ride/walk from your house to the nearest restaurant. You pick your phone, open your Google Maps app, enter the destination, and just follow the directions. How many times have Maps failed you? Very few, right?
Google Maps does this perfectly by continuously updating and refining their recommended routes based on data around traffic, road updates, and millions of commuters every day. Imagine how would Google Maps look like without these feedback loops? A disaster! You would be going into dead-end routes and reaching your destination far much slower.
That’s what we are trying to avoid at Knowledge Officer (Yes, we are back to Learning :D). Since day zero, we have differentiated ourselves from existing learning platforms by having this notion of dynamic, personalized, and market-driven learning paths, so we work to capture as much data as we can about how users are adapting to our recommendations and how these recommendations impact their journey towards mastery of a topic or getting a job.
One way by which we capture such data is through assessments. Our assessments capture an enormous amount of information about how users digest a given piece of knowledge or skill and what resources are more effective for users with a specific background or experience. And since we have designed our learning paths around three levels that map to different seniority levels of a given career goal (e.g. Product Manager), our assessments help us learn what knowledge and skills are necessary and need to be learned by a given user with a certain seniority level based on the answers of other users who are a bit more advanced in this career.
And with more data coming from thousands of users who are going through our assessments every day, we get to refine our learning paths more and more to make sure they are always the shortest and the most efficient!
If you are creating any type of learning environment for a group of users, assessments are a critical part for the following reasons:
- Assessments help you prove efficacy. Without assessments, you are completely blind and you can’t improve what you can’t measure.
- Assessments help you personalize the learning experience and give the learner only what they need.
- Assessments give learners room to practice what they learn and test their knowledge.
- Done the right way, assessments can help gamify the learning experience and motivate learners by giving them rewards based on their results.
- Assessments in themselves are another way of learning. Learners can digest specific types of information with a specific degree of understanding much better by answering a question or a scenario rather than reading an article or watching a video.
If you want to know more about our assessments or want to try them yourself, please download our IOS or Android apps, pick one of the career goals currently supported, and go through our learning experience.
Learning needs to be effective, practical, and engaging! That’s what we are trying to change about today’s current world of learning, so we would love to hear any feedback about how you learn today and what you miss in the current learning solutions.
Looking forward to your replies :)
Originally published at The Knowledge Blog.
