Increasing LMS engagement is absolutely key to ensuring successful training programs. If your learners are motivated to keep returning to their online training, then their skill pick-up will be faster, and they’ll naturally cover more knowledge areas.
But how do you create an attractive eLearning experience that makes your folks come back for more? Here’s our hit list of top tips to ensure your LMS trainees stay on track.
Keep Your Learner Data Up To Date
We’ll start with the basics: check your user data is accurate and updated regularly. Great eLearning experiences via LMS begin with timely, targeted and relevant enrolment, suggestions or notifications – if your learner information isn’t quite right, it can be frustrating for your employees. For instance, missing information concerning an employee’s job role might result in your LMS suggesting courses that the individual doesn’t need, or worse, that they can’t access a tranche of courses that might be interesting to them.
Making sure learner profiles are up to date can be a burden for your LMS admins, however, did you know that you can integrate your Learning Management System with your existing business systems?
Synching Your LMS With Your Existing Business Systems
Encouraging your learners to continually engage with their online learning journey ultimately means putting as few obstacles in their way as you can. By syncing your Learning Management System with other software that your staff use, you’ll improve their experience significantly. For example, when it comes to keeping user information current, you can simply link your LMS with your HR software – which means learner profiles are automatically correct, and your LMS can auto-suggest courses likely to be attractive to each individual without them having to go searching.
There are more advantages to syncing your Learning Management System with the stuff you use across the whole of your company too. Offering a single sign-on is an excellent way to ensure easy access to eLearning material and linking frequently-used office tools like Google Workspace, for example, means learners can easily share docs and images without multi-window hassle.
Make eLearning Personal
Once you’ve jumped the hurdles of accessibility, the next thing you should do is to personalise each learner’s interaction with your LMS. Customising a Learning Management System interface is easy these days thanks to a slew of great tools that come as standard on many LMS dashboards. Tailoring a learning interface both visually and content-wise gives users a sense of ownership and autonomy, and that’s going to boost their engagement with online training. Think about adding in the option for learners to upload a profile pic, letting them tweak their dashboard layout, and offering at-a-glance progress reports or upcoming deadlines. The more agency or connection your learners feel they have on their learning path, the more likely they are to stay on it!
Help Learners Communicate With Each Other
Some learners like to progress through their courses solo, but not everyone enjoys solitary learning or even does their best alone. Your business succeeds when your team works together – so why should eLearning be any different? That said, you can’t force it, but you can make sure there are easy ways for your employees to reach out to each other as they engage with their online training. Your LMS will have a range of chat tools, such as forum spaces, message features and noticeboards that you can make available to your learning community. If during the pandemic some of your learners shifted to remote working, consider that community is more important than ever in terms of moving forward with personal development. Open those lines of communication, and we think you’ll find that your users will connect with each other, help each other and offer encouragement to each other.
Optimise Your LMS Course Branding
A strong and simple way to boost a user’s engagement with your LMS is to make sure your courses have a clear and attractive design. Firstly we mean keeping the necessary clicks to a course module down to the bare essentials – structuring access to information, resources or assessment pages in a way that is easy to navigate.
Secondly, consider visual impact and the language you use within your LMS. Since your learners are upskilling within your company, it makes sense that your Learning Management System offers this eLearning in a way that reflects your brand. Consistently branding your LMS interface in terms of colour, logo, and voice in a way that feels familiar to your employees should reduce distractions and focuses users on their professional goals.
Lastly, don’t forget it’s your content that’s king, so tag, format and categorise accurately so everyone can find what they’re looking for quickly.
Create Mobile-Friendly LMS Content
The coronavirus pandemic has brought changes to the ways that many companies operate – particularly in terms of remote working. Learning online has shifted too, with more flexible options now available for training experiences. With the proliferation of mobile device apps and software, LMS users now expect to be able to learn when it’s convenient for them, using devices such as tablets and phones.
So, to increase LMS engagement, it’s crucial to design courses and course material to be compatible. A gamified, eLearning module is likely to have far more pull than one that requires the user to work through reams of text at an office desktop computer: we say opt for the former style where it’s appropriate.
Two top things to avoid if you want to keep your learners engaged on mobile devices are overly long pages to scroll through, and excessive load times. Plus, pay attention to your interface design if you’re developing mobile content, as poorly spaced buttons and links can be awkward to click on a touchscreen. Frustrating layouts are a barrier to learning!
Onboard your LMS Users From The Very Beginning
Familiarising learners with your Learning Management System from the beginning is a must if your online training is to be a success. Some folks in your company might be digital natives and ‘get it’ while others might find the tech involved a bit intimidating. We suggest a robust onboarding course to drum up some enthusiasm, and ensure everyone understands how online courses can be accessed and selected. Let them know what’s on offer, and why it can help in their daily jobs or on their career path in the long term. Importantly show everyone how to engage with your eLearning software. Without a proper LMS introduction, you run the risk of individuals losing interest in a useful course because they simply don’t understand how to navigate it.
Offer LMS Support To Learners Throughout Their Learning Journey
Other than the initial LMS introduction, you’ll need to make help available in case your learners get stuck. It may be a small hurdle, but trainees can fall behind and become disengaged if there’s no support available to quickly resolve the issue.
Luckily, there are plenty of ways you can make sure your users are supported and great communication tools are at the heart of it. This might come in the form of chat features so that learners can message managers or L&D admins instantly, or forums to post in so that colleagues can offer assistance.
If you can pre-empt possible pain points in a course, create a few explainer videos, or how-to resources so that your online training presents ways for learners to reach for solutions independently.
Build On Your LMS’s Functionality
One of a Learning Management System’s brilliant advantages is that, unlike traditional learning schemes, it’s not a static thing. We’ve briefly mentioned the benefits of integrating useful business systems with your LMS, but there are other ways to expand its functionality to increase engagement. If you’ve chosen well, your LMS should give you the option to use plug-ins and add-ons.
A basic platform that allows you to select and offer extra features is a definite plus if you’re looking to increase eLearning frequency. For example, linking in things like video conferencing for live seminars presents a more varied educational format, and offering rewards through certification can motivate learners to keep going with courses. Plus, there is a whole range of interface add-ons available out there that assist course creators in developing engaging experiences. Advanced visual reporting is great for learners and admins alike, and clever content creation suites mean that rich and stimulating training is easy to produce.
Use LMS Reporting To Your Advantage
Lastly, don’t forget that all the data your LMS collects about your learners and their progress will help you sustain interest in training across the board.
Drilling down how everyone is doing with their online learning – on both an individual and a group level – will help you make informed decisions about who needs more support to achieve training goals, and who could benefit from a more challenging learning path. Reports from your dashboard will show you how interesting your courses are to learners and you can make changes accordingly.
Results and stats aren’t just for employees, but are powerful numbers to help you create the most effective, and thus engaging LMS connections possible!