All over the world, many businesses have adopted a Learning Management System to deliver resources, skills and training sessions to their workforces. You may have already invested in an LMS, but it won’t make much of an impact if your learners don’t engage with the training on offer. So, how do you keep your employees on track with their professional development? Read on for our six-point guide to keeping your folks engaged and motivated.
Motivate & Grab Learner Attention
They say variety is the spice of life, and eLearning engagement is no different. At the root of motivation and engagement is interest, and there are several ways you can stimulate curiosity among your eLearners.
1. Attract Learners With Great Images
Just like a striking front-page photograph can encourage a reader to buy a newspaper or click on a web article, fantastic imagery built into your e-learning modules will add interest to online courses. While building a corporate identity is essential visually, do make sure that the material isn’t bland or poorly rendered. Strong images provoke and stimulate, great graphic design will add value without being distracting, and a decent level of layout variety across your LMS will attract and keep students on board.
2. eLearning Through Interaction
Increasing options for interaction should also draw eLearners in. Research shows that training elements offering an immersive experience tend to succeed in terms of user uptake. Dynamic videos that talk a student through a new concept is one way of doing this. Proactive learning that frequently asks questions posed in a witty and fun manner can also be a path to successful engagement. Humour is an excellent way to increase interaction with students, but make sure to keep it appropriate.
3. Use Multimedia In Your Modules To Retain Learners
You should also consider that your workforce is likely a varied bunch, and there’ll be a range of learning preferences. Incorporating multimedia content is a great route to offering a diverse group of users an engaging LMS experience. Where one staff member might prefer text-based training, another might be far more interested in taking up animated courses or downloading podcasts they can listen to.
4. eLearning Through Games
Gamification within eLearning modules is generally popular across the board if you’re looking to spike interest. This can be attractive since in-course games are often quick to complete and visually fun, so you’ll probably find games are a smart way to pique the interest of even the most disinterested learner!
Boost Confidence To Motivate Learners
Confidence-building is key to continued LMS engagement. When difficulty levels are pitched correctly, students will be more motivated to continue their learning journey. Make things too easy and you run the risk of courses seeming pointless, but if lessons are too complicated, the fear of failure can creep in, and some individuals might begin to feel they can’t progress and achieve.
1. How Do I Structure My eLearning Course?
Goals within training should be reachable. Micro-learning can help here, structuring lessons in bite-size chunks that build up to mastering a skill or understanding a new concept. Busy employees with significant workloads might abandon their online training if courses take too long to complete or include too many tasks before they can move on. Similarly, individuals with low confidence will benefit from a sense of rapid progress.
2. Setting Clear Online Training Goals
Clarity is crucial when it comes to confidence building – ensure your online training courses have a clearly defined destination. Whether that’s getting your staff up to speed with new legal requirements or health and safety practices, each student should be able to see why they’re learning a particular thing, and how it can help them in their daily work.
Increase Student Engagement Through Variety
A decent amount of agency can definitely help with learner engagement and motivation. Where possible, your students should be able to pick which order they’d like to tackle certain subjects in a module, select difficulty levels to suit their abilities and how they’d like the content delivered.
1. Let Your Employees Choose How They Learn
Learning can be emotionally-driven, and learning online is no different. Giving people a choice in how they drive their professional development forward gives them ownership of it, and in turn, increases the chances they’ll stick with it.
How Do I Create Social Learning Within My LMS?
No man is an island, and when you’re developing courses for your LMS, consider including plenty of opportunities for e-Learners to interact with each other. Most companies include ‘team-building’ days in their plans each year, but your eLearning software offers opportunities to get folks learning and bonding more frequently.
1. Create Healthy Competition
Studies show that healthy competition in the form of leaderboards can stimulate continued interaction with online learning tools. This can build confidence and additionally respect between co-workers while giving everyone something to aim for. If you aim to present training targets in a fun, game-like scenario, plenty of people will be drawn to participate even if they might not ordinarily be competitive.
2. Teamwork With An LMS
Some folks learn best in groups. Social learning can bring teams together and allow otherwise reserved individuals to showcase their talents to move a group forward as a whole. There’s a host of options to do this built into most LMS software so utilise it whenever possible. Live video, gamification and rapid-fire multiple-choice tests to compete on a team scoreboard can all spice things up and motivate staff to engage with their training.
3. Creating An Online Learning Community
Social Media is another tool at your disposal to keep students from feeling isolated. Group chats, info sharing, setting up online forums and so on can help everyone stay connected to their peers and their online studies. Your LMS may have social media plug-ins to link through, making feedback and help from contemporaries available at the touch of a button.
Include Learners in Course Creation & LMS Decisions Regularly
Your Learning Management System is there to deploy training to your workforce, but it’ll only work well if they’re buying what you’re offering. Listening to your eLearners is a crucial step to keeping them engaged with course content!
1. Listen To Ideas And Feedback
You might be the boss, but it’s important to remember when creating your LMS courses that knowledge doesn’t always come from on high – you’ve likely got some really skilled people working for you! Every team member, regardless of position, probably has something they can offer. For instance, a staff member who’s been with you for years might have some great ideas for improving processes, while a new hire might have brought with them innovative ideas for customer service. Stay open to suggestions for course content and allow team members input to boost engagement.
2. Should I Involve Learners When Building Online Training?
Yes! Give and ask for feedback regularly when developing new courses. If you involve your learners with LMS decisions and make an effort to discover what they’d like to build on, course uptake will be higher. Moreover, you’ll find interest will be sustained in the longer term. Make your company LMS your employee’s LMS. You can even ask individuals or groups to develop and present a course if it’s their specialism, but at the very least, you should be asking learners how they feel about courses they’ve completed.
3. Utilise Integrated LMS Reporting
LMS reporting tools should be able to show you how quickly your employees are completing a course – and if one sticks out as taking a while for everybody, it might either be a bit confusing or, the horror of horrors, maybe a bit dull. Either way, reach out to your users and see what can be done to improve the experience for all.
Making eLearning Satisfying
Following eLearning courses should ultimately be satisfying for your staff. Whether that’s making sure they see that they’re picking up skills that improve their workdays or building courses that offer rewards in other ways.
1. Build In Storytelling And Learner Interaction
For adult learners, it’s generally more satisfying (and enjoyable) to learn something you know has a point or will be an asset one day. One way to ensure a satisfying training experience is to utilise storytelling, creating real-life scenarios and then relaying how to approach them. A simple video with a friendly presenter running through a series of common workplace issues and how to best deal with them is going to give students answers directly. If you combine this with a Q&A, set up a sharing forum or set up a teamwork exercise, you’ll be satisfying a need for recognition and help in tackling real-life questions.
2. Offer Rewards For eLearning Engagement
Everyone knows that the carrot is far better than the stick when it comes to motivating folks. But more than that, the right kind of carrot, delivered at the right time will keep your employees engaged with their online courses. A straightforward way to do this is to build your courses with points, stars, or badges that can be earned at regular intervals. Video games are satisfying to play, partly because you can complete stages and move up to higher levels, so leverage this in your course structures. Reward frequently, and you’ll boost motivational levels among staff.
Ultimately, a Learning Management System can deliver a robust and long-term training environment for your teams. Still, to keep everyone learning, it’s got to be attractive, satisfying, confidence-building and inclusive. Keeping things fun and rewarding is critical to continued user engagement, so make the most of the inbuilt options your LMS offers, and you should end up with motivated learners willing to keep expanding on their skills!