Consider a scenario is which you have uploaded a new eLearning course on your company’s Learning Management System (LMS). The course contains a new tool for existing sales process. This tool will help employees manage sales more efficiently. The main objective of this course is to assist your sales department to get on with this new tool as soon as possible and start applying the new steps in their daily sales process. You have high expectations from the course and your learners. You assume that sales people with grab this course from both hands and benefit from it. On the contrary, your sales people don’t enroll in the course. The course has very few takes. Even the registered learners fail to complete the course. Sales department continue to use old methodology.
There could be many reasons but in all probability it could be any of the following:
- The tool’s application is not fully understood by the sales people.
- The sales department did not understand how new tool solved their existing problems?
- The structure of course was complex and unclear.
- The course couldn’t be stopped and resumed later from the same stage.
- The course didn’t present any incentive in terms of career or any other to learners.
So what possibly you could have done differently to avoid all this? How do you ensure that your learners are motivated to take the new eLearning course? To make sure your learners participate enthusiastically in self-paced learning and take it seriously, you must start right from the start i.e., when you start designing your online course. You need to keep following aspects in mind.
1. Set Clear Learning Objectives
Your learners will need to know why they should take a new eLearning course. What benefits will they get from the course? The course needs to have clearly defined objectives. If the objective(s) is not stated clearly, the learners will be reluctant to take time off to do the course. If the course does not provide any compelling reason for the learners, they will consider it as a waste of time. Considering above example in mind, if your course states the learning objective as “Understand the New Sales Tool” or “Learn to use the New Sales Tool”, it does not compel learner to invest his/her time on it. On the other hand, if you state the learning objective as “Be able to take orders using the new Sales Tool” or “Access product information by using new database”, it gives clear-cut information to the learners about what this course will offer them in terms of their development.
2. Specify How the Course Will Help Them in Their Jobs
If learners realize the learning will solve a set of specific problems they encounter at work, motivation to learn is much stronger. When uploading a new course for any department, you must share with learners that how the new course will help them in doing their jobs more effectively and efficiently. In our example, it might be possible that learners didn’t understand the benefits of new sales tool. Therefore, you need to provide clear benefits of the new sales tool and how will it ease their routine problems and help them close more deals than before.
3. Make Learning Self-Directed
Experienced learners are high on self-directing. When you enforce a course on them which can’t be paused and resumed afterwards, they are not going to like it. Not only experienced learners, this is the case with all adult learners. Hence, it is better to offer them choice to go back and forth within the module if they want to re-visit a portion of skip a portion (due to prior understanding). Experienced learners prefer to take ownership of their learning and reward you with faster and on-time completion of courses.
