Keeping motivation in online courses is a challenge for trainers and HR personnel: Courses are forgotten, postponed, or not completed. We explain the critical moments when you can lose your learners and show you how to solve the problem using the example of the “Auto-Reminder” tool.
Whether as pure e-learning or blended learning: Online courses have become an integral part of the continuing education industry. This undoubtedly offers many advantages for educators and learners, but it also presents new challenges. One of the biggest problems is to motivate learners to “stay engaged”.
Especially in companies, HR developers and trainers quickly face the problem that learners do not process the courses as motivated as hoped: Courses are forgotten, postponed, or not completed. Frustrating, especially when schedules are tight and budgets are limited.
The three critical moments in online courses
In our experience, there are three critical points in time when your learners' motivation in online courses drops rapidly:
Before the course begins, for example, right after the invitation. Depending on the LMS or learning tool, learners usually receive a notification, such as an email, that they are supposed to join a course. Such one-time information can quickly get lost in the workday. If the self-motivation of your learners is not high enough, it may happen that they do not even join the course and then forget about it.
Shortly after the course starts: Once the first hurdle is taken and your learners have entered the course and processed the first content, the motivation curve typically drops quickly. This is especially common with employees in companies who have to deal with courses with a lot of or very long content. A classic case we often observe in pure e-learning: Employees process the first three or four learning contents quickly, but from the middle of the course, they slow down and eventually become completely inactive.
Shortly before the end of the course: If the learners are very motivated, they join a course immediately and process the content reliably, nonetheless, some learners typically struggle before completing a course. Often, final exams after processing all important learning units become a hurdle – due to diminishing motivation, exam anxiety, or lack of time to study. A drop-off at this point is particularly frustrating for you when necessary certificates cannot be issued.
Our solutions: Individual and automatic reminders
If you notice that your learners are not starting, processing, or completing the courses as planned, you generally have two options to increase motivation in online courses:
1. Individual reminders:
A good LMS like blink.it always gives you the opportunity to track the learning progress of the learners precisely: You can see where your participants or employees are and at what point they may not have continued with the course.
blink.it provides the ability to track learning progress accurately and identify drop-offs. // Source: blink.it
In the image above, you can see the learning progress of different example participants in a course. Here you can identify learners who have dropped off at one of the critical points:
“Anna Freling” dropped off shortly before completing the course.
“Diana Bach” processed three learning contents and then became inactive.
“Paul Amsel” is in the course but has not processed a single piece of content.
You should use such overviews to directly reach out to learners in such cases and motivate them:
Contact “problematic” learners via email or ideally seek a personal conversation.
Convey to the learners why the course is important – for them personally and for their daily work.
Clarify any questions or problems that led to the drop-off.
2. Automatic reminders:
In personal coaching or small participant groups, personal communication is very effective. However, with several hundred participants in a course, this becomes an overwhelming effort for you as a trainer or HR developer. Instead of individual reminders, it is better to use automatic solutions for large online courses.
For this purpose, we have developed the “Auto-Reminder” for the blink.it learning platform: With the Auto-Reminder, you as the course leader can create reminders with personal messages for your learners. The reminders are automated and sent via email according to individual rules.
This is how the Auto-Reminder works easily:
You select the critical moment at which you would like to remind your learners.
You determine the time when your participants will receive a reminder: after a flexible period of time or on a specific 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 simple steps.
The Auto-Reminder feature is available to all customers in the Enterprise package of blink.it.
That’s why regular “reminders” are so important
Motivation in e-learning is not a given. With good course didactics and varied content, you can support your learners – yet, there are many reasons why online courses are forgotten, dropped, 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 selecting an LMS or learning platform, make sure that you always have a simple overview of your learners' progress – and immediately recognize the three critical moments.
Address your learners directly to clarify problems and questions and motivate them to learn.
Utilize helpful features like the Auto-Reminder for large participant groups.
In addition to course statistics and the Auto-Reminder, blink.it offers you many other features to increase your learners' motivation. Test these features now in a free admin demo and get advice from our experts.
