Commissioned News Story (Source: Geenio)

A lot of modern organizations are already using some form of e-learning technology for employee onboarding, training, performance, and assessment initiatives, but online training courses often don’t live up to the needs of instructors, trainees, or purchasing managers.

Geenio, which makes course-authoring tools for organizations, is trying to change that, and has built what it calls the Pathboard. This is a course-authoring mode for its software that can be used to add new pages, sets of pages (lessons), questions and sets of questions (tests) to courses. The tool enables course authors to see all possible learning paths and course branches because it represents non-linear courses in an easy-to-use visual style.

According to the company, non-linear courses mimic the natural learning process by providing alternative learning paths for students. Authors can build courses of varied complexity by modifying the presentation of materials in response to student performance and demonstrated level of knowledge.

“During the development process we had a very special set of requirements for the course editor because we wanted to build non-linear courses that would adjust in complexity depending on the student’s abilities and change the way the student would go through the course,” said Konstantin Andreev, founder and CEO of Geenio. “Our observations revealed that each student’s frame of mind and comfort were the cornerstones for a successful learning experience. A positive attitude helped students to digest new information and later turn it into skills. An overly complicated course would demotivate students, resulting in tiredness and dissatisfaction.”

“An overly simplistic course, on the contrary, would make a learner bored,” Andreev added. “Such a learner would simply be clicking through the course, instead of processing information and gaining new skills. The main conclusion from these observations was the need to adapt the complexity of a course to the student’s level of knowledge.”

That’s where the Pathboard comes in. It builds on the concept that there may be several parallel ways to go through a course. A student might start at the medium level of complexity, and after a few pages, take an assessment that gauges the current level of knowledge. The users can then be redirected to a more advanced path, kept at the same level, or moved a step back to seea more detailed explanation of basic things. This depends on what the course author deems appropriate.

The Pathboard also lets the course creator look at the map of a course from a bird’s-eye view to add new course objects, edit interactions between them, and change the sequence of learning modules in the course if need be. Authors can make knowledge checkpoints throughout the course and direct their audience to appropriate learning paths.

Geenio recently raised a $2 million seed round of funding from several individual private investors. The company said it would use funds to continue building its team and strengthen its product/market fit.

About Geenio

Geenio Group is an international company with offices in Europe and USA, Palo Alto, California. For more information, visit https://geen.io.