How to improve the completion rate of online courses

One of the problems common to many online courses is that related to the percentage of users who abandon the course before its conclusion.

That's why you need to find effective ways to encourage students to complete online courses.

Raising the completion rate for eLearning isn't difficult. Here are some tips for improving online course completion rates.

Make your students understand the aim of the course

The dropout rate of online courses is often linked to the lack of clarity of the course objective. It explains to your students what they will get by attending the course. To effectively write down the goal of your course, think about what your students should be able to do at the end of the course.

At the same time, to increase the eLearning completion rate, it is useful to clarify what the learning objectives are. The learning objectives they are a breakdown of this goal and represent the different steps that give the student the skills and competences to achieve the aim of the course.

Make your course short and precise

Long content such as video and text can be boring and distracting for students, enough to push them to abandon the course.
So, make sure that the contents of your course are short and focused on the teaching objective. You can do this by dividing long contents into small modules that facilitate both understanding and use of the course.

With this in mind, the approach to microlearning is one of the trump cards.

Engage your students with quizzes and surveys

Engaging your students regularly with quizzes and surveys can help improve your completion rate in eLearning.
So instead of waiting for the end of the course to evaluate them, you can add learning tests every 2-3 lessons. Remember that feedback on the answers has a strong emotional and educational value for the student. For this, you will have to explain why an answer is wrong. Additionally, you can reinforce the correct answer by explaining why it is.

Surveys are also a great way to get feedback from students and at the same time give them a sense of involvement. Finally, in addition to being a great way to improve the completion rate, surveys help teachers identify areas of the course that need improvement.

Use email reminders

To prevent students from falling behind in using an online course, it is helpful to make use of well-planned and consistent email reminders.

Here are some tips for making effective reminders:

• First, before the start of the course, send an e-mail with the access data to the course and the expiry date for use. Something like: "You signed up for course X and you have Y days to complete it."
• Secondly, when you have noticed that the student has been losing interest and has not entered the course for several days, you can send a message that says: “We have noticed that you have not entered the course for X days. Click here to resume the course ".
• Finally, you can use the FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out) approach with messages like this: "X% of your colleagues have completed course Y and received the certificate. Click to complete the course too. "

Reward their efforts

Another factor that can help increase the completion rate of online courses is to reward the efforts of students taking advantage of the course.
To do this, you can reward them with certificates that they can share on social platforms, or add a level of progress to the course and allow students to share it on social media.
In this way, other students could be motivated to complete the didactic path.

Here are some creative ways to provide feedback to your students online.

Article taken from Wizcabin