How to increase user engagement with your eLearning courses

There is a lot of talk around the industry, about the importance of employee engagement in business. Engaged employees have been proven to be vital for retaining customers, encouraging growth and innovation, and reducing attrition. In fact, a report from the Harvard Business Review states that employee engagement has a significant impact on the overall success of an organization. Furthermore, employee engagement is also extremely important when it comes to training and development. Engaging learners is an essential factor in helping training to stick. Engaged learners take away more from a training course, are better able to apply new skills to their jobs, and are more likely to exhibit post-training performance improvement. Thus, when you increase user engagement with your training content, you are able to ensure a much higher return on investment from your Training and Development initiatives.

A Learning Management System (LMS) is an excellent opportunity to increase the availability of web based training to your workforce, but many companies find engaging their user base challenging. 

While many companies find that engaging their user base with a course housed in a Learning Management System is challenging, often this is simply down to unfamiliarity with a new system, or failure to craft an effective or user-friendly Learning Management System. Increasing learner engagement is essential for making training effective; it helps training accomplish the organization’s goals. So, to increase user engagement with your Learning Management System courses, keep these tips in mind:

 

1. Use Plain Language

The benefit of online learning is that it can be presented to a large number of employees. Plain language is a must to make training effective for a variety of users with different education or experience levels. Contrary to creative writing techniques, training content should be written to deliver information that is clearly and easily understood.

 

2. Seek Feedback

Your user base will be more engaged if they are able to provide feedback and connect with their trainers, even if it is on a remote basis. Including contact information and incorporating surveys are excellent ways to promote engagement through feedback. Brief lead-in questions and polling are also excellent techniques to incorporate into online training.

 

3. Seek Professional Assistance

Creating engaging content is not always a simple task. Using an eLearning company to produce your content or consult on your learning systems can make a vast improvement in the effectiveness of your online training.

 

4. Make Training Relevant

Training is more effective if the learner finds it relevant. Include information in your Learning Management System courses that uses real-world examples and explains why the training is important. This will increase your employee’s buy-in, improve engagement, and help learners apply learning concepts on the job.

 

5. Use Microlearning

Studies have shown that breaking information down into smaller chunks of similar content can increase retention and learning speed. This is especially important for online learning, because topics are being learned independently. As a general rule, the more complex the topic, the more chunks it will need to be broken into.

 

6. Use Visual Stimulation

A large percentage of adult learners prefer visual assets incorporated with other kinds of media. Engaging imagery, graphics that add clarity to concepts, and memorable visual cues will improve the learners' engagement. As an added bonus, consistent imagery makes content easier to understand and improves post-training retention. This also applies to Learning Management System dashboards. If the first things users see when logging into your Learning Management System is an unattractive, hard-to-navigate page, they won’t dig deeper for content in your Learning Management System.

 

7. Commit To Engaging Training

Make a commitment to focus on improving training and increasing your employee’s connection to their learning content. Engaging training does not just happen by accident. It takes attention and resources to make sure the training meets your business needs, and benefits the organization as a whole.

 

Final Thoughts 

By focusing on simple techniques, it is possible to improve the effectiveness of the content in your Learning Management System and increase user engagement. Online learning courses that engage users can increase learning retention, improve the application of learning techniques on the job, and ensure improved organizational performance.

By using techniques like micro-learning to make content more relevant and easy to understand, Learning Management System courses can make training more effective. Techniques like seeking feedback and professional assistance can also provide a solid basis for creating an engaging and effective Learning Management System. Improvements like these keep trainees involved in the learning and allow them to improve their performance.

Source: eLearning Industry