Learner engagement is one of the most important concerns of elearning.

Although metrics have been defined which can measure learning engagement, it’s important to understand first what it means.
If the learners don’t find the elearning modules interesting and leave them before they finish, it’s a huge problem. It’s important to think of learner engagement as having a relationship with the learners. This engagement happens when the learners start trusting the elearning module. This does not happen through technology. For gaining the trust of the user of the elearning course, you have to instil interest in them. You have to talk about issues that matter to them. The learner engagement is important so that employees learn from elearning and businesses boom. Learning engagement is when people decide to continue with the elearning course. In other words, the bounce rate of the elearning course should be low.

Learning engagement has been defined in two different ways:

• Engagement with a module’s content: This implies using the content and coming back to it.
• Involvement with the technology of elearning: This implies using a system, and coming back to it because learners’ liked the way it functions. There are many other things also that are important to define learner engagement. These are what kind of resource it is, what is the topic of the resource and the time taken to finish it.

You should know that someone chooses elearning content based on his/her relationship with who has prepared the content. This can also be someone who refers the content.
 
Learner engagement is affected by the following factors:

• Is the leader using it: If the leader is using the learning platform, his followers are going to follow suit. For example, in the case of Avon, the company selling beauty products, the sales leader used the online learning platform due to which it was used by sales representatives too. In 2019, 45% of the matter in this sales platform had been contributed by sales leaders. Therefore, Avon’s beauty representatives prefer to use this content because they trusted the sales leaders. Hence, the beauty representatives trusted the online learning content and kept accessing it again and again.

 

• Who prepares the content: Vodafone has launched its content on the learning platform called Fuse. The reason it has high learning engagement is that the content had been prepared by people who were doing well in the business. The people who were stars of the retail business were chosen. They gave information about what they did in the sales process’s stages and captured the markets through their practices. The entire management population engaged with the content because it knew that the content was given by the best salespeople. On the other hand, 95% of the retail sales population engaged with it too. It engaged with the content after its working schedule used to be over.
   
  The content was prepared by regional managers and hence had such a high learner engagement. They also set an example for the retail workers to use the content. Vodafone reported that wherever regional managers were using the content, their teams used the content 10% more than the average of the retail sales population.
   
  So, the learning and development team should not be creating the course to drive learner engagement. Learner engagement should be driven by a subject matter expert who has done the job. The Learning and Development people just help with the technology and are the support people for creating an elearning course.

 
This is important to ensure that the learner takes the maximum interest in the course.
 
These are the ways in which you can achieve such high learning engagement:
You need to comprehend the relationships that people have with others in the company. This way you can know who the best people in the business to deliver the learning are. Hence this way, you can reduce the gap between subject matter experts and the learners. You must also give a chance to learners to suggest what they need to learn, hence this is useful for building a course.