Keeping motivation high in online courses is a challenge for trainers and HR managers alike: courses are forgotten, postponed, or left incomplete. We explain the critical moments where you risk losing your learners and show you how to solve the problem using the "Auto-Reminder" tool as an example.
Whether as pure e-learning or blended learning: online courses have become an integral part of the continuing education industry. While this undoubtedly brings many benefits for educators and learners, it also introduces new challenges. One of the biggest challenges is to motivate learners to "stick with it".
Particularly in corporate settings, HR developers and trainers quickly face the issue of learners not engaging with courses as enthusiastically as hoped: courses are forgotten, postponed, or not completed. This is frustrating, especially when schedules are tight and budgets are limited.
The Three Critical Moments in an Online Course
In our experience, there are three critical times when your learners' motivation in an online course drops rapidly:
Even before the course starts, for instance immediately after the invitation. Depending on the LMS or learning tool, learners usually receive a notification, such as an email, asking them to join a course. Such one-time information is quickly lost in daily work routines. If your learners' intrinsic motivation isn't high enough, they might never join the course and simply forget about it.
Shortly after starting the course: Once the first hurdle is cleared and your learners have joined the course and completed the first content, experience shows that the motivation curve drops off quickly. This happens particularly often with corporate employees who have to work through courses with voluminous or very lengthy content. A classic scenario we often see in pure e-learning: employees breeze through the first three or four learning items, but slow down around the middle of the course and eventually become completely inactive.
Shortly before the end of the course: If learners are highly motivated, join a course immediately, and work through the content reliably, experience shows that some still stumble just before finishing. Final exams after completing all important learning units are often a hurdle—due to fading motivation, test anxiety, or lack of time to study. Dropping out at this stage is particularly frustrating for you, as it means necessary certificates cannot be issued.
Our Solutions: Individual and Automatic Reminders
If you notice that your learners are not starting, progressing through, or finishing courses as planned, you generally have two options to increase motivation in the online course:
1. Individual Reminders:
A good LMS like blink.it always allows you to track the learning progress of learners closely: You can see where your participants or employees stand and at what point they might have stopped working on the course.
blink.it offers the ability to track learning progress precisely and identify dropouts. // Source: blink.it
In the image above, you can see the learning progress of various 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 through three learning items and then became inactive.
“Paul Amsel” is in the course but has not yet completed a single item.
You should use such overviews to address the learners directly in these situations 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 issues that may have led to them dropping out.
2. Automatic Reminders:
For one-on-one coaching or small groups of participants, a personal approach is highly effective. However, once you have several hundred participants in a course, this becomes an unmanageable effort for you as a trainer or HR developer. Instead of individual reminders, you should use automated solutions for large online courses.
We developed the “Auto-Reminder” for the blink.it learning platform specifically for this purpose: With the Auto-Reminder, you as the course creator can set up reminders with personal messages for your learners. The reminders are sent automatically via email based on custom rules.
How the Auto-Reminder Works So Easily:
You choose the critical moment when you want to send a targeted reminder to your learners.
You determine the timing when your participants receive a reminder: either after a flexible period of time or on a fixed date.
You write a personal reminder message for your learners, which is sent automatically as an email.
On the blink.it platform, you can set up personal reminders for your learners in three simple steps.
The Auto-Reminder feature is available to all customers on blink.it's Enterprise package.
Why Regular "Reminders" Are So Important
Motivation in e-learning is not automatic. You can support your learners with good course design and varied content—yet there are many reasons why online courses are forgotten, abandoned, or left unfinished. To prevent this, you need to take action yourself and help your learners stay motivated with small reminders.
Here is an overview of our tips:
When choosing an LMS or learning platform, make sure you always have an easy overview of your learners' progress – so you can spot the three critical moments immediately.
Address your learners directly to resolve problems and questions, and to motivate them to learn.
For large groups of participants, use helpful features like the Auto-Reminder.
In addition to course statistics and the Auto-Reminder, blink.it offers many other features to help you increase your learners' motivation. Test these features now with a free admin demo and get advice from our experts.
