As an online course content creator, you need your students to complete their lessons. This is how you know that your courses are of great value to them. However, in cases where the completion rate is poor, you tend to think that you may not be delivering the right value to the students. Knowing how to skyrocket your learning engagement rates will increase sales for your online courses.
Current analysis of learning engagement of online courses
Research shows that the completion rate of online courses is very poor. Currently, it shows that about 13% of students complete their online courses. This means that 13 out of every 100 students complete their online courses. To some content creators, this may not bother them as long as the students are paying for the courses. While getting paid for your courses is great, you need to focus on creating quality and valuable content for your students. When you create valuable and useful online courses, this helps to improve the learning engagement rates of the lessons. In the long run, the learning engagement rates will determine if new students should pay for your courses.
What is learning engagement?
In online course delivery, learning engagement is the students’' willingness to consistently complete their courses and achieve their learning goals. In the eLearning industry, this willingness is used to measure the learning engagement rates of certain online courses. Since the student or learner can be customers, partners, students, or employees, the willingness to learn will vary among these people. Several factors at play affect learning engagements. This includes reward, perceived value, interest, and curiosity.
How to increase the learning engagement rates of your online courses
As content creators contend with low engagement rates, it is important to know how this can be increased. Doing the following will help get their learning engagement rates up:
- Build a lot of excitement before you launch the course: Course content creators need to learn how to create the right buzz before launching their online courses. One sure way to increase your learning engagement rates is to raise awareness about your online courses. Your potential students should be excited about your courses as you get ready to launch them. If you can pique the curiosity of the student(s) with your new course, then your learning engagement rates will skyrocket when you finally go live with the courses.
- Adjust the lesson formats: Not all students will take to the same learning style. This means that your lesson formats should come in multiple options. Students prefer certain ways of learning. Depending on the nature of the course being taught, students prefer their learning formats to be in the form of images, texts audio, or videos. One way to increase student engagement with your online course is to provide your lessons in several formats. Additionally, you need to curate each lesson according to the right delivery format that will appeal to each student.
- Give assignments to maintain active learning: Giving assignments is another great way that you can increase your learning engagement rates. When you give students assignments to study on their own, it helps them to practice what they have learnt. This method is one way to promote active learning among the students. This way, they will become more interested than ever in actively participating in the lessons. Using assignments, students can easily achieve the learning outcomes of each lesson. This will considerably lead to increased learning engagement among students.
- Review the structure of your content: The structure of your online course is another element that can impact student engagement. Students will complete a particular course if it is well structured. This is why online course creators should divide their lessons into smaller segments. Generally, shorter lessons are more effective in comparison to longer content. As a rule of thumb, it is ideal for a creator to keep its content to just under 30 minutes or more. But this depends on the nature of the course. Shorter video content of between 5 and 10 minutes can also be engaging.
- Know the students: One way to also increase the learning engagement rates with your online course is to know the students. You can easily create an online community of students who take your course. Students will engage more with your program if there is a community where they can interact with like-minded people. In addition, you can also leverage this online community to know them better. To increase student learning engagement rates, creators need to establish a one-on-one connection with their students. This way, they have a basic idea about why each student is unable to complete their programs.
- Add elements of gamification: Gamification has always been an important element of studying. This is no different from online courses. One way that you can watch your learning engagement rates skyrocket, is through gamification. Studies revealed that students that study with the use of gamification performed 14% better than their peers. You can easily gamify your online lessons. This can be through a point-based system or giving out awards and badges when students complete each lesson. You can encourage students to complete their lessons by inserting elements of gamification during important milestones.
- Create your discussion space: You need an elaborate discussion space where students can interact with other people. This discussion space will be used as a way to get feedback and ask important questions. Students want to get ideas from peers, teachers, and mentors when struggling with difficult courses and lessons. When you create a discussion space for your online course, this can easily increase your learning engagement rates.
- Evaluate the content analytics of your lessons: Your analytics help you track the progression and performance of each student. This is an important feature of your online course management system. It helps you get unique data about each student plus how they engage with each lesson and course. Many online course platforms provide content creators with analytics. This helps them to improve their lessons and courses according to the satisfaction of the end-users.