Keeping your learners motivated in online courses is a serious challenge for trainers and instructional designers: courses get forgotten, put off, or set aside altogether. We explain the critical moments when learners are most often lost and show you how to solve the problem using the auto-reminder tool as an example.
Whether as pure eLearning or blended learning, online courses have become an integral part of the continuing education industry. While there are undoubtedly many advantages for trainers and learners, there are also new challenges. Probably one of the biggest problems is motivating learners to "stick with it".
Especially in companies, instructional designers and trainers quickly face the problem that learners are not as motivated to complete the courses as they had hoped: courses are forgotten, postponed or not completed. Annoying, especially when schedules and budgets are tight!
The three critical moments in online courses
In our experience, there are three critical moments when your learners' motivation drops precipitously in an online course:
- Before the course starts – for example, right after the invitation. Depending on the LMS or learning tool, participants usually receive a notification, such as an email, that they should join a course. Such one-time information is easily lost in the daily work routine. If your learners' self-motivation is not high enough, they may not even join the course and then forget about it.
- Shortly after the course starts: Once the first hurdle has been overcome and your learners have joined the course and worked through the initial content, experience shows that the motivation curve drops quickly. This happens especially often with employees in companies who have to work through courses with a lot of content or very long content. A classic case that we often observe with pure e-learning: Employees process the first three or four learning units quickly, but from the middle of the course they slow down and ultimately become completely inactive.
- Shortly before the end of the course: If learners are very motivated, they join a course immediately and process the content reliably, but experience shows that some learners falter before completing a course. Often, final exams are a hurdle after working through all the key learning units, due to waning motivation, test anxiety, or lack of time to study. Dropping out at this point is especially annoying for you if it means necessary certificates can't be issued.
Our solutions: Individual and automatic reminders
If you notice that your learners are not starting, working on, or finishing courses as scheduled, you basically have two options to increase motivation in your online course:
1. Individual reminders:
A good LMS like blink.it always gives you the ability to closely track learner progress: You can see where your learners or collaborators are and at what point they might have stopped working on the course.
blink.it offers the possibility to precisely track learning progress and detect dropouts. // Source: blink.it
In the image above you can see the learning progress of different sample participants in a course. Here you can identify learners who dropped out at one of the critical points:
- "Anna Freling" dropped out shortly before completing the course.
- "Diana Bach" worked on three learning items and then became inactive.
- "Paul Amsel" is in the course but has not worked on any content.
You should use such overviews to directly address and motivate learners:
- Contact "problematic" learners by e-mail or, ideally, seek a personal conversation.
- Communicate to learners why the course is important – for them personally & for their daily work.
- Clarify any questions or issues that led to dropout.
2. Automatic reminders:
For one-on-one coaching sessions or small groups of participants, a personalized approach is very effective. However, if you’ve got several hundred participants in a course, this becomes an unmanageable effort for you as a trainer or personnel developer. Instead of individual reminders, it's better to use automated solutions for large online courses.
For this very purpose, we have developed an auto-reminder for the blink.it learning platform: With auto-reminder, you as a course instructor can create reminders with personal messages for your learners. The reminders are sent automatically via email according to individual rules.
Here’s how the auto-reminder works:
- You select the critical time at which you want to specifically remind your learners.
- You determine the time on which your learners receive a reminder: After a flexible period of time or on a fixed date.
- You create a personal reminder message for your learners, which is automatically sent as an email.
On the blink.it platform you can create personal reminders for your learners in three easy steps.
The Auto-Reminder feature is available with the blink.it Enterprise package.
This is why regular reminders are so important
Motivation in e-learning is not a matter of course. With good didactics and varied content, you can support your learners – yet there are many reasons why online courses are forgotten or not completed. To prevent this, you need to take action yourself and help your learners stay motivated with small reminders.
Here are our tips at a glance:
- When choosing an LMS or learning platform, make sure you have an easy overview of your learners' progress at all times and can recognize the three critical moments immediately.
- Speak directly to your learners to clarify problems and questions and motivate them to learn.
- For large groups of learners, use helpful features like the auto-reminder.