Creating an online course is easy. Especially when you’re using LearnDash as your LMS.
But creating effective online courses involves much more than what meets the eye.
Let’s face it. Part of your job as a LearnDash course creator is to ensure that your courses provide knowledge that is applicable in real life. It’s a responsibility if you ask me.
You want your learners to become better at something. You want to see them succeed.
But how do you actually do that?
The secret is to start looking at courses from your learner’s P.O.V. Realize how you can assist your learners at every step of the way.
Of course, content is the foundation of any online course. But there are learning techniques and tools that you can use to create a lasting impact.
That’s why today we’re going to cover the most effective ways to create high-impact course modules in LearnDash.
So if that sounds like something you want to know, then read on.
The most effective techniques for high impact online learning
1. Analyze your course content through reports to improve quality
A proven way to improve your course modules is to measure their impact.
This means analyzing how your learners are engaging with your courses. Knowing how much they score after completing each module can help you comprehend how well they understand your courses.
When you track the time they spend on course modules and analyze their completion rates, you can figure out what parts are easy or difficult for them.
Therefore, reports can help you realize the shortcomings of your course modules and what you can do to improve them.
Using reporting tools like WISDM Reports for LearnDash, you can follow your learner’s progress, and check real-time activity by course category, quiz category, lesson/topic category, etc.
For example – if your learners started a course a long time ago but have still not completed it, it might mean one of the few things.
The course is dull, boring, irrelevant, or does not provide them with any real-world benefits. Their completion rates and scores will clearly reflect these factors. And accordingly, you can readjust your courses to improve their impact.
Read more: The importance of student reports in online learning
2. Implement group-based learning to improve skills
Social or group-based learning in course programs allows learners to interact with and learn from each other even without physical interactions.
Therefore, placing your learners into groups and allowing them to riff off each other’s ideas can create more impact than you can anticipate.
Encouraging subject-based or course-specific discussions can maximize knowledge retention and improve relatability. Not only does it spark conversations but will also boost their confidence and self-esteem.
You can leverage the power of LearnDash groups to group users together and track their progress. These groups can have one or more courses associated with them.
To build a community around your course offerings, you can use the BuddyPress Integration, create user groups and associate it with a LearnDash course. The course participants get added to the groups automatically and the group becomes private. Users can then have a lesson-specific discussions as they become available to the group. Thus, you are able to create more value around your courses.
If you’ve created a course and want to enroll a group of users, you can use the LearnDash Group Registration plugin to register users in bulk for a particular course or course bundles. It allows you to create groups as well as sub-groups and automatically assigns the bulk buyer of your course as group leader. Thus making management easier.
Accordingly, you can plan activities that give your learners the opportunity to work together. For example – a group project. Group projects can help in developing interpersonal as well as management skills
Note: This kind of learning strategy is really beneficial in a business setting.
If you have created online courses to train corporate employees, you can register users in bulk and automatically assign the manager as a group leader in LearnDash.
This way you won’t have to pay attention to individual users as the group leader can report to you the group’s performance.
Based on the evaluation, you can decide on the next steps for each course module.
3. Make your modules effective with Gameplay
The presence of game-like elements in a non-game environment has become the norm. Among most online learners, it’s an expectation.
It not only makes your courses more desirable but also gives your learners a sense of accomplishment.
No matter which type of learning management system you’re running – a corporate training website, an online school, or a Udemy-like course website, gamification can help ramp up competitiveness and drive better results.
In fact, financesonline states that 89% of employees think they would be more productive at work if it were more game-like. So it makes sense to include game-like elements in your course modules to make them more effective.
It’s usually done by rewarding learners with badges, course points, or ranks upon interacting with the learning content or completing a module. LMSs nowadays allow course creators to deploy game elements by default or by using 3rd party integrations.
With 3rd party tools like BadgeOS, you can reward your learners with ranks, badges, and achievements after they accomplish a specific task. You can also depict their progress using the progress bar and display high scores on a leaderboard.
Gamification proves to be effective in a number of ways. It will also force you to define clear goals and objectives before you present challenging but attainable tasks for your learners.
Thus, reinforcing the fact that to make your course impactful, you have to take your learner’s journey into account.
Read more: From Games to Gamification- How to Engage Learners on Your LearnDash Site
4. Include micro-video lessons
Long-form course modules are overwhelming.
Therefore, including short video lessons in your courses can be effective as they deliver more in less time.
When information is presented using rich, engaging videos it’s much easier to digest and retain. Their compact nature helps to complete a module in just a couple of minutes, unlike traditional courses that take hours or days to finish.
While it is just one way of delivering course content, micro-video lessons allow you to break up your course content into smaller and meaningful chunks.
For example – Instead of a 30 min. tutorial video, you can divide the entire lesson into 6 smaller videos of 5 minutes each and emphasize the key points. Because no one wants to sit through a 30 minutes lecture.
Pro Tip: You can also insert videos into your quiz questions!
5. Ask and incorporate feedback into your modules
Lastly, asking your learners to rate your courses can further help you improve your course modules.
Maybe the topic wasn’t covered properly, the definitions weren’t clear enough, or the objectives weren’t set in the beginning. Once you know where the learners are facing challenges, you can modify that module of the course.
Whether that means adding more resources, allowing more quiz retakes, or completely reworking the course from scratch. Learner reviews can help you get real-time feedback that you can incorporate into your courses to improve their quality.
Tools like Ratings, Reviews, and Feedback can be used to get genuine feedback from students. What’s more is that these ratings, reviews, and feedback will boost the credibility of your courses and can significantly improve sign-ups!
Conclusion:
It goes without saying that creating valuable courses will not only help your learners succeed but also improve your ROI.
As a result of creating successful online courses, you can look forward to more satisfied learners, more enrollments, and a boost in revenue.
So to give your learners the edge and stay competitive in the online learning business, you must focus on improving the quality of your courses.
For starters, you can try out one of the few tools/ techniques and see how it works out for you. In addition to the plugins mentioned above, you can check out these must-have themes and plugins too.
You can also consult experts to assist you with integrating any of the plugins or if you want a custom functionality to be built on top of your current LMS.
Let us know which technique you are going to use in the comments section!
