Do Your Courses Command Attention?

By: Justin Ferriman • December 22, 2014
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One of the best feelings is when you spend a great deal of time creating an online course and finally get to release it.

Whether you are selling the course or just creating it for internal training, it’s a great feeling to see the training become “live”, knowing that all the hard work you put into creating the course content has paid off.

Or has it?

One cruel realization for anyone who has created elearning is that just because the course exists, it doesn’t mean that people are actually going through it attentively. In fact, in both the educational and corporate sectors, learners often will skip through a course as fast as they can just to finish it.

There are a variety of ways to combat this, and all of which should be considered. In general, the strategies for retaining learner attention are either forced or not forced.

For example, you can force a degree of attention by adding a timer to the continue functionality in your course, usually as a configuration within your learning management system. While you still cannot guarantee that learners are going to review the content, you may increase the chances that they do.

Naturally this strategy can backfire, which is why you should also investigate non-forced ways to improve learner retention. In simple terms, this means making sure that your content isn’t boring.

For example, any course that just presents text in bullet-point format falls into the “boring” category. Would you want to take a course like that? Most likely not.

The best courses use a form of both forced and non-forced attention techniques. If you’re going to require someone review a certain section of your course for five minutes, make sure there are interactive elements so that they are engaged with the content.

For more information regarding learner attention online courses, have a look at the infographic below created by Shift ELearning.

Justin Ferriman

Justin started LearnDash, the WordPress LMS trusted by Fortune 500 companies, major universities, training organizations, and entrepreneurs worldwide. He is currently founder & CEO of GapScout. Justin’s Homepage | GapScout | Twitter