This blog shares a few ideas to increase retention in e-learning courses.
Whatever your industry, you need skilled employees. So investing in training and development has become the strategic priority for improving the company’s bottom line performance.
But the question here is, between their everyday tasks and busy schedules; will your employees be able to remember the key takeaways of training for long? Research says that people tend to forget 80-90% of what they have learnt in just one month after the training. Shocking, right?
After putting in huge effort and time, if the learner doesn’t remember anything after completing the training, the basic purpose of training is lost. So what can be done? Well, here are a few ideas that can help you.
Repeat the training
Practice makes perfect. Spaced repetition of training will help employees assimilate knowledge and retain it for a longer time. Also, in case they miss/forget information, they get another chance to learn what they have missed.
Make learning interactive
Interactivities or engaging elements significantly improve knowledge retention. Convert your employee from a passive into an active participant by adding interactive elements to the course. You can design various types of interactivities such as click on tabs, click on images, hotspots, drag and drop etc. based on the content type.
Break information into bites
According to a BBC survey, bite-size learning facilitates greater understanding, application and retention than a day-long equivalent and results in savings of up to 30%. So, don’t bombard learners with too much information at once; instead develop micro eLearning modules. This will help learners take the course at any point of time and also help retain longer.
Assess regularly
Adding a quiz at the end of the eLearning is a common practice, but there are benefits to assessing more frequently, maybe every month or quarter. eLearning assessments are a great way to reinforce learning. This will help you to find out if there is some lack of knowledge and schedule training accordingly. More importantly, they give an opportunity to learners to move the information from working memory to long-term memory.
Connect emotionally
If you want your employees to remember key takeaways, make an emotional connection. This means the learner should be able to immediately recognize and connect the information with his job life. This will make the learning stick for a longer time. This can be done using various strategies such as storytelling, scenarios, case studies, avatars etc.
These are my ideas on how you can help your learners recall information for months after training. Do share your ideas.
