How to avoid losing students in your online classes
This is undoubtedly a concern for all companies involved in e-learning. Preventing a large number of students from dropping out at the beginning of an e-Learning course or during the course itself is one of the factors to take into account when designing your product. The extensive offer in the virtual market or the lack of interest results in a number of dropouts that you must evaluate and manage. Read on and find student retention strategies for your course!
Student Retention Strategies
We know, you’ve worked hard to create a quality course and yet it may not be reaching the intended target audience. However, there is something you can do to improve reaching your potential audience and maintain students retention. Aspects such as proximity, commitment to the centre or relational links are important in face-to-face training, but in e-Learning you have to offer something extra. How can you do it? Here are strategies for improving student retention.
Create value. It is important to have a course that represents something that goes beyond a mere product, the creation of an experience is fundamental to ravoid online drop-outs. A useful way to do this is to actively listen to find out if your methodology is effective. Always listen to your students, their problems and input, always be alert and analyse the changing needs of your students! And of course, you should use the elearning tools that best fit their needs. All these actions will help you increase students retention.
Micro learning is an effective tool. It is a modality very appropriate nowadays in which you divide your course into smaller training modules. It will improve your students’ retention and comprehension of knowledge while facilitating their downloading, regardless of whether it is done on a mobile phone or computer.
The video format is something to be exploited. It is not presumptuous to say that it is a more of an effective tool for acquiring knowledge, as it is not only illustrative, but also entertaining and enjoyable. Don’t overdo it with the duration either, it’s not a documentary, so make it eye-catching without forgetting concrete and quality content! Keep this in mind and observe the great result in students retention.
Assess student satisfaction. To calculate such a feeling of engagement, it is very important that you take into account aspects such as direct communication (by using videoconference or other communication tools), user experience or content management, among others. In other words, any final impression that you can obtain from the student during the course. Prevention in education retention is better than cure!
Segment! The more you specialise, the more quality you will get. You must know your target group and what their interests and skills are. In this way, you will be able to build the pillars that will form part of your loyalty strategy. Moreover, by focusing more specifically on a profile, you will improve the relationship with the student, which is one of the most customised factors that will help you to create a valuable product improving students retention.
In any case, the most important thing is not to ignore the students. Pay attention to their problems or opinions and make sure they feel supported throughout the whole process – don’t let them drop out!
Do you know any other factor affecting student retention? Do you already have a student retention plan?