Student retention is a major concern for all instructors in the eLearning industry. You always want a student to be engaged in more than one course or lesson you are providing on your platform. To ensure this you must do the due research to upgrade your platform from others. A student’s academic performance and social integration are factors that we must consider when we talk about student retention. Ensuring the happiness of students can help us get results as far as student retention is concerned.
Another key to a more successful eLearning platform is reaching out to new potential students for future courses. Having a constant flow of students to your platform is crucial to ensure that your business does not arrive at a stalemate. Researching the market and catering your content to more students or marketing your platform on social media are some of the ways we can get this done. It does not matter how good your online course material is if you are not being able to bring in more students.
In this article, we are going to take a deep dive into the tools and strategies we can equip ourselves with to retain more students and reach out to newer students for our eLearning platform. So let us not waste a moment.
The Basics of Student Retention
If we take a look at the issues that cause students to discontinue studies from a course we can find that most of the time it is because of lack of motivation. A student that does not feel focused when partaking in one course will not be incentivized to continue further. Of course, there are other issues that arise, but this is speaking purely from an academic point of view. Students not doing too well would also be less inclined to further continue with their studies.
Retaining and motivating your students is a multi-step process that must be started early on. Here is an overview of the topics we are going to go over:
- Establishing achievable goals for students
- Efficiently structuring your courses
- Building a community around students
- Encouraging student feedback
Establish Achievable Goals
If we take, for example, the regular education structure, classes are endlessly taken and students are evaluated once every few months. This system works for some but is detrimental to a large number of students. Academically weaker students often feel lost as they are unable to cope with the materials being offered. Breaking down coursework into smaller modules and individual lessons helps a student focus on bite-sized pieces of work.
We are going to look at solutions to these issues without our very own Tutor LMS. Tutor LMS’s content drip lets us slowly ease students into the course. Content drip means that you can slowly and automatically have the course material be published to students. This reduces headaches for both you and your students.
When creating a course you should keep in mind how streamlined can I make my material. So that when a student is going through your courses, a sigh of comfort is the first thing they feel when looking at the structure of the course. But we at Tutor LMS cannot forget about the instructors and creators, so we give you the power to make it a lot easier.
Using the Course builder of Tutor LMS is as easy as pie. Set up short defined lessons and content drip so that your students can have it one bite at a time.
This way the student can be more effectively spurred on to complete the goals and keep on pushing. This is also an easy and precise way to measure success among students.
Structure Your Courses
Make your courses easier and more palatable to students across all spectrums. Students should be able to go from start to end of a course and come out feeling a sense of accomplishment. If students are feeling more proud of themselves after a course they will be far more inclined to take further courses on the same site.
But how do we structure our courses effectively to make them more attractive to students? Setting up interactive quizzes and assignments helps engage students and keeps them interested.
Interactive quizzes after every module can help test a student’s knowledge and give grounds for self-evaluation from students themselves. Watching their own progress will keep them engaged and motivated.
Tutor LMS offers:
- True/False
- MCQ’s
- Image Matching
- Open-Ended
- Fill in the blanks
- Short Answers
- Image Answering
Along with many other types of quizzes that you can create for your students on the fly.
Community Building Is Key to Retention
A core component of taking a class is the student-teacher relationship. With online courses and classes, the scope for interaction is very limited. You must take to forums and Q&A sections to interact with students. Interacting with your pupils will have them understand your passion for teaching. This will inspire them to do better and eventually convince them to invest more in your courses.
Veteran users of WordPress have definitely heard of BuddyPress. For those that are not familiar with BuddyPress, BuddyPress is a popular open-source social networking plugin. With this, you can create social networking platforms on WordPress for any purpose. Undeniably this makes creating a community a quite easy task. For more on the Tutor LMS and BuddyPress be sure to read this article.
Show Students the Results with a Verifiable Certificate
After a student has finished taking one of your courses, motivate the success with a completion appraisal. Provide your students with a certificate of completion. This has a two-fold effect, the student will have proof to show and put on their resume if they wish.
Secondly, having an appraised certificate at the end of a course makes the effort for completion legitimate and worthwhile. You have something to show for the hours you spent on the material.
But giving out some generic old certificate makes you look, well, generic. To add more weight and flair to your certificate, Tutor LMS certificate Builder can help save the day. With the Tutor Certificate Builder’s drag and drop features and a plethora of customization options, your certificates can look just as professional and personalized as you want them to be.
Encourage Student Feedback
Feedback is the best way one can make improvements to their shortcomings. For a service like online courses, student feedback is of utmost importance. Listen to your community of students can help you find gaps that you can improve on. This would in turn improve student relationships as you would be taking their concerns into good consideration.
This step goes hand in hand with the student community building we spoke about before. It creates a sense of community within students and helps them feel less alienated while taking an online course.
With Tutor LMS you can have amazingly easy access and an interface that would let you connect with your students over specific courses.
Reaching Out to Future Students
So far we have talked about student retention, but to complete the process we must also know how to bring in more students. If we are only retaining the students we have currently with not a lot of new students joining in our business is going to be stale. Here are our top suggestions for getting more students to take up your courses.
Employ the Prowess of SEO
Every piece of content on the internet has to pass through the Google Search engine. That means that having your course be SEO optimized is one of the best ways for it to get more traction online. But what do we mean by an SEO-optimized course really? Basically, how blog posts are SEO optimized, we can have the landing pages and course snippet pages of our course be SEO optimized. Of course, the course material does not need to have any changes made to them. Just the parts that students see before joining a course.
The world of SEO is vast and wide, but this article can only offer so much time. Without stretching too far we can guide you towards a few tools that are quintessential for SEO keyword optimization.
You Can Never Go Wrong With Free
Offer free courses on your site along with the paid ones to make things very interesting for prospective students. Free courses will drive traffic to your site hence to your other courses as well. Make sure the material offered in the free courses is worth everyone’s time and students might leave stellar reviews. A few good recommendations from students about your courses are all you will need to gain rapport.
Alongside the free courses, Tutor LMS lets you set up course previews for your courses. For the premium and paid courses, you offer you can activate course previews. Prospective students can preview the first few course materials and get a taste of the rest of the course. This would encourage them to check out more courses eventually translating into sales for you.
With Tutor LMS we also have the option to have sales and discounts that we can offer to students. An age-old marketing tactic in the world is to give discounts to promote a product. We can employ the same strategy using WooCommerce integration with Tutor LMS. WooCommerce lets us set courses as products and have them on sale on our eLearning site. This is sure to bring in more students as well as retain past ones as they might be inclined to continue with us for discounted prices.
Have More Instructors on Your Site
Try to employ more and more instructors to your eLearning platform. More instructors mean multiple windows of exposure for students, every instructor can help bring in their own students and thus improve the overall count of your site.
Multi-instructor sites are difficult to manage though, but with Tutor LMS and its multi-instructor support, this is quite a breeze. If you are a solo teacher and promote your courses that’s only one instance of promotion. Now consider you have 5 other instructors onboard your platform, now when a promotion is done it is 6 instances of promotion. Virtually six times the promotion.
Wrapping Up
Student retention and acquisition are all a moot point if our course material is not up to the mark. The focus must be brought to retention after we have very quality course content. Eventually, course development is an everlasting process and it is this constant thrive to improve and better our material that will help us shine brighter than others.
Employing a good tool like Tutor LMS to help you with all these tasks will surely make life a lot easier. Be sure to check out Tutor LMS and let us know your journey with Tutor LMS down in the comments. Sayonara.
