How To Create Learner Engagement In The 21st Century: 3 Powerful Strategies
In today’s fast-paced digital world, learners expect to find instant answers to their questions – and often look for immediate solutions to their problems.
1. Complement Deep Learning With Quick Fixes
What’s more, learners aren’t always looking for information they’ll retain; they might just be after a template, tool or guidance to use in the moment. This applies particularly to irregular tasks that are undertaken sporadically, and to those that are low-risk. Obviously, this isn’t always the case – and sometimes, a quick-fix is inadequate. In order to learn more complicated skills, or build longer-term capabilities, a deeper level of engagement and commitment is required from learners.
A couple examples include leadership training and compliance training. Both instances call for learning content that challenges, engages, surprises and, particularly in the case of leadership, stretches the learner.
2. Give Learners Incentives To Return
Do you struggle to draw your learners back in? Maybe you got them interested initially, but they don’t seem to come back for more. This is a common challenge. A great tip here is to incentivize your learners. Why not reward them after they complete sections of the learning?
Incentivization could include ranking learners with leaderboards, awarding badges or certificates, or perhaps sharing the success stories of other learners. Find more suggestions for effective incentivization in the free ebook: How to Grow Your Training Business Faster, Smarter and More Profitably.
3. Get Learners Talking
The most successful digital content takes on a life of its own online, spreading organically through user engagement. You can look at metrics such as likes, shares, and comments to measure its effectiveness. Don’t worry if your LMS or portal of choice doesn’t come built with the ability to share virally; there are other ways to get your learners engaging socially.
Other tactics you could use for increased learner involvement include interactive social polling activities, discussion forums, live online coaching and virtual classroom sessions.
Be Integral To Long-Term Learning
Whether or not your content plays a key role in the long-term learning of your users is an ultimate indicator of how successful your eLearning will be.
Take a microlearning-inspired approach by applying some structure and shape to your learner’s journey. Group together related content, and enable learners to work through in a bite-sized format that will be manageable for them and their lifestyle.
The outcome of spreading the learning out over time is spaced practice. This results in improved, longer term performance progression. To ensure learners complete the content, think back to the different types of incentivization you could use, and check out the 4 tips in this free eBook. The sweet spot for your eLearning will be when you can deliver the effectiveness of microlearning at scale, which is known as Big Learning.
Discover how to differentiate your online training products to ensure success by reading the free eBook: How To Grow Your Training Business Faster, Smarter And More Profitably.
