Keeping motivation in online courses is a challenge for trainers and HR professionals: Courses are forgotten, postponed, or not completed. We explain the critical moments when you can lose your learners and show you, using the example of the “Auto-Reminder” tool, how to solve the problem.

Whether as pure e-learning or blended learning: Online courses have become an integral part of the continuing education industry. This undoubtedly brings many advantages for educators and learners, but it also presents new challenges. One of the biggest problems is motivating learners to “stay on track”.

Especially in companies, HR developers and trainers quickly face the problem that learners do not engage with 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 the online course rapidly declines:

1. Even before the course begins, for example, immediately after the invitation. Depending on the LMS or learning tool, learners usually receive a notification, such as an email, prompting them to join a course. Such one-time notifications can easily be overlooked in daily work. If your learners' self-motivation is not high enough, they may not join the course at all and then forget about it.

2. Shortly after the course starts: Once the first hurdle is overcome and your learners have entered the course and completed the initial content, the motivation curve typically declines quickly. This happens particularly often with employees in companies who have to process courses with a lot of or very lengthy content. A classic case we often observe with pure e-learning: The first three or four learning contents are handled quickly by the employees, but from the middle of the course, they slow down and eventually become completely inactive.

3. Shortly before the end of the course: If learners are very motivated, they join a course immediately and reliably process the content, however, some learners tend to struggle before completing a course. Often, final exams after completing all important learning units become a hurdle – due to declining motivation, exam anxiety, or lack of time to study. A dropout at this point is particularly frustrating for you if necessary certificates cannot be issued.

Our solutions: Individual and automated reminders

If you notice that your learners are not starting, processing, or completing the courses as planned, you essentially have two options to increase motivation in online courses:

1. Individual reminders:

A good LMS like blink.it always gives you the option to track the learning progress of your learners closely: 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 possibility to track learning progress accurately and identify dropouts. // 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 dropped out at one of the critical points:

1. “Anna Freling” dropped out just before completing the course.

2. “Diana Bach” processed three learning contents and then became inactive.

3. “Paul Amsel” is in the course but has not yet processed a single item of content.

Such overviews should be used to directly address and motivate learners in such cases:

• Contact “problematic” learners via email or ideally arrange 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 may have led to the dropout.

2. Automated reminders:

For individual coaching or small participant groups, personal communication is very effective. However, with several hundred participants in a course, it becomes an overwhelming task for you as a trainer or HR developer. Instead of individual reminders, you should use automated solutions for large online courses.

For this purpose, we 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 based on individual rules.

This is how the Auto-Reminder works:

1. You select the critical moment at which you want to specifically remind your learners.

2. You choose the timing at which your participants will receive a reminder: After a flexible period or on a specific date.

3. You create a personal reminder message for your learners that will be automated and sent as an email.

On the blink.it platform, you create personal reminders for your learners in three easy 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 automatic. With good course pedagogy and varied content, you can support your learners – yet there are many reasons why online courses are forgotten, abandoned, or not completed. To prevent this, you must take action yourself and help your learners stay motivated with little reminders.

Here are our tips at a glance:

• When selecting LMS or learning platforms, make sure you always have a simple overview of your learners' progress – and can immediately recognize the three critical moments.

• Directly address your learners to clarify problems and questions and motivate them to study.

• Use helpful features like the Auto-Reminder for large participant groups.

In addition to course statistics and the Auto-Reminder, blink.it also offers a variety of other features to enhance your learners' motivation. Test these features now with a free admin demo and let our experts advise you.