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By Michael Grant
 What would you do if you held a course
and nobody came?
Our Director of Education, Rick Nigol, has graciously
lent me his space so that I may pontificate on a big issue that I
am hearing a lot about these days: the take up and completion of online
courses. I wanted to put down some thoughts on this prior to
our August 24th webinar on this topic.
For all the discussion around making the business
case for eLearning, it seems to me that many people simply ignore
the problem of lower take up and completion rates. You can do
an elegant job of calculating the ROI for your eLearning, but if you
aren't attracting learners and they aren't completing courses then
who are you fooling? Hint: yourself.
It seems to me that there are two management challenges
here: one is that you have to get people to start the course and the
other is that you have to get them to complete it. Let me take
each in order.
Getting People to Take the Online Course
The main challenge here is that most people have
never taken a course online. Think about it. Basically
our entire educational experience is shaped by a classroom model.
People simply don't know what it means to take an eLearning course
and they don't like things that they don't know.
I like the idea of using carrots and sticks.
There is all sort of things you can do to entice people to take a
course including:
- Let people see and try out a course
- Promote the obvious advantages which include easy access, time
management, the ability to refer back to material, and (hopefully)
the enhanced interactivity
- Some people will actually care about the learning outcomes and
how this will help them do their job better or position their career.
There is a tendency to focus too much on the content itself and
not enough on the outcomes of the course, so communicate this clearly
- Offer incentives to first time learners users or employ various
contests to encourage early sign up
- Celebrate those who have taken the plunge and let them tell their
stories about the advantages of online training. Allow experienced
eLearners to spread the word to newbies
- Make the course a requirement and track those who sign up
Getting People to Complete the Online Course
eLearning has suffered from lower completion rates.
There doesn't seem to be any decent data on this, but our discussions
with clients tell us that this is a problem.
To a large extent I think lower completion rates
are an eLearning design issue. There are 2 aspects of design
that result in lower completion rates:
1. Poor Product Design
People are social and they prefer to learn in ways
that has them interacting with other learners, a facilitator or with
the content. It is amazing how much eLearning is nothing more
than electronic content dump.
A client described to us how they went with a suite
of eLearning content that amounted to an electronic library.
Not surprisingly the take up was underwhelming and the completions
equally bad. If people are just going to read text why not just
give them a book? You have to make it fun and engaging.
Remember, your competition for people's attention is often TV or video
games. There are lots of way to educate, engage and entertain
so that people are dying to come back for more.
2. Poor Managerial Design
Managers can be very naïve about people's motivations
to complete a course. The K-12 model is basically a command
and control system with not a lot of room for freelancing. People
then move adult learners into an online environment and assume that
none of those enforced disciplines are required. Big mistake.
Sure, we all believe in lifelong learning etc. etc.
but in our experience people are pretty calculating when they take
an eLearning course, and I mean that in a nice way. If you don't
make the costs and rewards clear people will simply not prioritize
the course. And unlike a classroom there are not the same social
pressures to not "showing up".
People are busy and you need to explicitly lay out
the benefits of completion, on many levels. For some people,
this involves tightly integrating course completions with performance
appraisal systems. But for others it may be about providing
recognition for completion. Still others like to be competitive,
so why not turn completion into a sort of competition? The fact is
that there are many motivations for completing a course and you have
to make sure you are touching on as many as possible.
We have been most pleased with the participation
and completion rates for our eLearning! I am looking forward
to discussing these issues in further detail at our August 24th
webinar. In the meantime, let me know what you think at michael@elearncampus.com.
Michael
Grant is Co-Founder and Director of Research for eLearn Campus.
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