How to increase the completion rates of your online training program

Thijs de Vries
Founder & CEO

On average, 85% of employees stop learning before finishing online courses. In this post we’ll share tips to make your training programs more engaging and improve completion rates up to 5x more than e-learning.

The current average completion rate for online courses is only 15%. This means that 85 out of 100 employees stop learning before fully completing your online courses. Immersive training programs have proven to be far more engaging.

As industry expert Jeremy Dalton notes in a recent PwC’s study into the effectiveness of VR for soft skills training:

“Virtual reality will help to drive a new age of learning, development and education by delivering a cost-effective, immersive and efficient experience to train people on both hard and soft skills.”

We see this effect clearly in Warp Studio, where completion rates average 60% (and move up to 80%). Read on for 5 ways to increase the completion rates of your online courses.

1. Set clear goals

To make the right decisions in interactive, immersive scenarios, learners need to understand the context of a decision. The goal for a specific scenario should therefore be clear from the start.

To engage learners even more and increase completion rates, this goal should matter to the learners. They need to know why this goal is important for them and the company they work for.

2. Make scenarios easy to understand

Clear scenarios are easier to play and have higher completion rates. Interactive elements should be easy to find and questions and answers should be formulated clearly.

Make sure to involve all necessary stakeholders to create high quality scenarios. When more people are involved in the creation process, the scenario will improve. Make use of our testing features to get feedback and improve.

3. Use active instead of passive learning

Active scenarios are more engaging and learners are more willing to complete them. In each scenario, make sure learners are active.

Active scenarios are scenarios where scenes are short, where questions have been written in an active form and where the learners feels part of the scenario. They need to act in order to complete it.

4. Take implementation seriously

Communication is key to get people playing. Learners should be informed that the immersive learning course exists, where to find it (for example through an LMS integration) and how to play it (mobile, tablet, or a shared VR headset).

Block time in calendars or arrange VR classroom sessions in case learners do not play by themselves. And set clear deadlines for completion.

5. Follow up with learners that didn’t complete the course

It’s important to follow up with people who didn’t complete the course. Ask them why they didn’t complete (for example because they didn’t understand the scenario or didn’t know how to play).

Gather as much feedback as possible, improve the scenario, republish and communicate the implementation strategy again.

           

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