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.

Motivating learners through e-learning courses is not an easy task to accomplish. In simple terms, motivation is defined as the process that initiates, guides, and maintains goal-oriented behaviors. Motivation provides a reason for doing something.

In the e-learning context, learning motivation should be the reason or desire for one’s learning. The e-learning reason should be designed in a well-structured manner that will motivate learners to learn more effectively and resist less. If an e-learning course fails to provide a reason or engage the learners, it means that it has simply failed. Here are 5 tips that will show a smooth path to my readers in motivating their targeted audience in the e-learning process. Moreover, my tips will also answer the following two questions.

How to develop learner engagement in the process of learning, which is the main concern.
How to avoid drop-outs in your e-learning courses?

Tip 1 Catch hold of Learner’s attention: Grabbing your learner’s attention has a major impact on the e-learning environment. The important things to remember here are first, content should stimulate your learner’s curiosity and second content should be relevant.

Online learning takes place in an ambiguous environment that makes it adopt the learner engagement strategy. Under this, the training should not be revolved around knowledge awareness, but it should involve action by the learner in between the training.

Knowledge check questions from within an e-learning course are a prominent example of checking the learner engagement in your course. Using various resources of e-learning such as video, audio, avatars, music, and animations also serves as a significant effect on the learner’s mind.

Tip 2 Course should be well-structured: To avoid drop-outs in your e-learning course, make it well-structured. An excellent blend of various online resources should be made to achieve e-learning objectives and goals. A designer should clearly state the expectations of the e-learning course. Moreover, the course should be accompanied by the guidelines and instructions, total number of assignments, contact hours, peer interaction posts and projects to be submitted for the course.

Tip 3 Boost the spirits of your learners by your presence: The problem of drop-outs occurs majorly because of a lack of an online support system for learners. Regular communication with the learners is key to success.

One must make sure to participate in online discussions on social media like Facebook, LinkedIn, etc. This will allow learners to exchange ideas with each other and definitely enhance their knowledge.

Tip 4 Monitor and Feedback of Performance: The performance should be monitored very carefully, as providing an e-learning course to learners is only half the work done. The critical aspect of an e-learning course starts when performance is monitored and feedback has to be prepared.

Tag: learner engagement

How to increase learner engagement in elearning?

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

How to motivate learners in E-learning?