5 Useful Ways To Enhance Learner Engagement
Have you ever wondered that what one thing can make your online training program very successful? You can find the answer easily if you analyze the situation thoroughly. This one magic element is “engagement”, which makes your online training highly effective. If engagement of your learners is zero, their productivity is low and they fail to retain any knowledge gained during the training session. That is the reason why top training programs prioritize the involvement of their learners at all phases of the training session. If engagement is high, your learners turn into fully motivated workforce, which in turn result in excellent performance.
One of the best tips to engage your learners is to transform them into active stakeholders in the journey of their own learning. Following are few effective strategies that enhance learner engagement and you can easily apply into your online training programs.
- Understanding the skills and requirements of your learners
First of all, you must study and find out your learners’ needs and skills and then design the online training program accordingly. This is a wonderful way to implement effective engagement strategies during the training process. You must involve your learners from the initiation of the program, that data collection period of the training session. The standard method is to go through the performance data for determining skill gaps and learning needs of the learners.
For in-depth analysis, you can consider metrics and numbers; however, they do not reveal the entire picture. The best technique to know your learner’s actual needs for knowledge is through determining their engagement.
You can take feedback from learners by employing methods like observations, interviews, surveys and focus group conversations. In fact, when you interact personally with the learners, it helps in engaging and motivating learners.
- Using Personalization
One of the top elements your learners consider when they take part in any training and development program is the relevance of the content. Apart from the skills and teachings that are applicable to the workplace or real-life scenarios, the training courses must be relevant to the particular contexts in which your learners are going to perform.
To increase the relevancy of your courses, you can apply case studies on certain hypothetical situations. This will help your learners a lot, especially if the content of courses reflects common problems faced in the working environment. In this way, learners will realize that they are being given the desired knowledge and help needed. When you use personalization as a strategy to engage learners, you should also involve addressing the contexts of your learners. This means that course customization is required as per your learners’ language, learning preferences, and culture.
- Communicating frequently and taking feedback
You can enhance your learners’ engagement through frequent communication and getting feedback time to time. The atmosphere in which your workforce is working should be encouraging and relaxed. In fact, you should try to make the training experience exciting and memorable for your learners by hiring a trainer who is comfortable enough to work with and is approachable whenever needed. Additionally, provide an online training platform, which is user-friendly.
You should facilitate learning process by offering your learners to give their feedback freely and establish communication with you during sessions. Another important thing that you should not forget is evaluating your online training program. Ask your learners about where improvement is needed after every module.
- Using interactivity
Since your primary goal as a course designer is to increase your learners’ engagement during all the phases of the training, you must try every possible tactic to do so. When we consider online learning, you can enhance learner engagement by adding interactive elements in the courses. You can employ various ways to add interactivity into your courses. For instance, you can use videos, drag and drop activities, and pop quizzes. Other approaches include using polls, virtual rooms, whiteboards and annotation tools. Apart from this, make sure that your LMS enables you to develop high-quality, rich content.
- Overcoming the barriers to learners’ engagement via LMS
Learning management system offers your learners the easiness to take up any course according to their convenience and capability to grasp the teachings. They have the freedom to go back to any content they have not understood and repeat the training session, and so in this way they feel that have the authority in whatever they are learning. This makes them high motivated, productive and confident.
