Coaching every participant individually is one of the hardest things to scale. A real coach asks "you said this last time — what progress have you made since?" and tailors the next question to that specific answer. Doing the same for hundreds of participants by hand is impossible.
In Knowly, you can build the same shape of follow-up — personal, sequential, anchored in what each participant actually wrote — without doing it by hand for each person. The pattern is what we call an automated coach track: a sequence of Micro trainings that each pick up where the participant left off, using the Previous answer element (in Swedish: Visa svar) to surface their own earlier answer at the top of the next session.
If you want the mechanic-level walkthrough of the element itself, see Previous answer: show a participant their own answer from earlier in the journey. The rest of this article is about the pattern.
What a participant experiences
Two weeks into a leadership programme, a participant opens a Micro training called "Uppföljning på dina mål" ("Following up on your goals"). The first slide shows them, in their own words, what they wrote two weeks earlier:
"I'm going to build a habit of asking each of my reports one coaching question per week." — Your answer from 2022-11-10 at 08:45
Right under that, two new prompts:
What progress have you made toward your goal since then?
What obstacles have you hit, and how will you tackle them?
Every other participant on the same journey sees the same Micro training — but each one sees their own goal at the top, and their own follow-up reflection lands against that. The personalisation is automatic. No coach in the loop, no manual setup per participant.
How you build it in Knowly
The pattern uses two things you already have:
The Previous answer element. This is the actual mechanism. On a slide in a later Micro training, you add a Previous answer element and point it at the question from an earlier Micro training in the same learning journey. When each participant reaches that slide, they see their own earlier answer rendered above whatever comes next.
Knowly's scheduling. The Micro trainings in the sequence go out on whatever cadence fits — every two weeks, once a month, the rhythm you'd want a real coach to keep. Each one is scheduled like any other activity.
That's the whole pattern. The "automated" part is that you author the questions once and Knowly takes care of the rest — pulling the right answer for each participant, delivering each follow-up on its own schedule.
When to reach for this
Coach tracks land best when the participant has had real time to act between sessions and where the value of the next prompt depends on what they did last time. Goal-setting and follow-up. Habit change. Practising a behaviour and reflecting on what happened. They work less well when the follow-up question is generic enough that everyone could be asked the same thing — in that case a plain new question is simpler.
For the editor-side details — adding the element, picking the source question, and the rule about which questions you can pull from — see Previous answer: show a participant their own answer from earlier in the journey.