Ways To Ensure Maximum Student Retention In Your Online Course

The e-learning market is vast and dynamic. In recent years, there has been a great shift from traditional learning styles to online courses and digital academies. The growth of the industry is definitely an advantage for all who want to create online courses and sell them. However, with this growth comes great competition and savage challenges. One of the greatest challenges faced by all online course content creators is the student retention rate.

• How can I ensure that students love my courses?
• What changes should I make to my online courses to make sure that it is popular?
• What would make students eager to learn with my digital academy?

If you are an online course creator and you have been wondering about the above questions then we can help you. This article focuses on some of the techniques that will allow you to greatly strengthen your student retention rate. These strategies are simple yet powerful because they make sure that your course and your content is preferred over similar contents over the vast market of digital learning. From microlearning to steady feedback, these techniques cover all the bases of interaction with your students or e-learners.

1. Connectivity and community: Your online course is much more than just the quality of your teaching faculty or their reputation in the academic guild. To make sure that students keep coming back to your digital academy for their knowledge quests, you need to focus on the needs of their minds. Studies show that students learn better if they are a part of a community which promotes healthy competition. Forming communities such as Q & A forums or doubt portals where you can come together to apply your knowledge and create a solution for your fellow learners, allows young minds to feel engaged and interested. Not only do such groups provide additional knowledge to the learners, but they also create a bonding and engaging experience for your learners which makes them prefer your courses over others which may consist of boring or monotonous content. Thus, you can increase your student retention rate almost by 72% if you create such online communities via different portals such as webpages, blogs or social media platforms.
2. Introduce personalised assessments: Digital academies often represent a monotonous form of learning for students who prefer to engage with others and learn such as the learning style in traditional classrooms. Introducing personalised assessments helps them get that much-needed one on one attention. This strategy benefits online course moderators in a number of ways. Online course moderators can utilise this one on one interaction to create personalised reports or generate feedback about the performance of their course. This helps them collect feedback and also guide the student much like a mentor would. Thus, utilising this strategy would help you threefold by increasing your student retention rate as well as your learner’s satisfaction and feeling of engagement.
3. Warning systems or Signs: Whenever a student is about to drop out of your online courses they indicate this with typical actions. Thus, you can collect some data and generate an early warning system that would allow you to intervene and stop them before they drop out. Some of the signs those dropouts students indicate are as follows: missed assessments, irregular course completion, and stagnation. Whenever these signs crop up, you need to act on it and have an interaction with the e-learner to understand the reason for their disinterest. Your early warning system may be something as simple as passive data collection or it may be based on more vocal feedback from your students and other members of your educator circle. To generate any kind of detection technique, all you need to do is to generate some warnings when your learners behave in typical manner that indicates their need to dropout from the course. By doing this you also collect feedback about the weak point of your digital academy and its various courses. In turn, you can also use this early intervention technique to recognise what the learner needs and make suitable changes. This strategy, in particular, is utilised by course content moderators to increase their student retention as well as generate much-needed feedback about the online courses which are crucial for its growth.

These steps will ensure two things at the same time. Firstly, you will be able to maintain a stable number of students in your online academy. Secondly, you would not need to worry about cross-selling your new courses. You will already have a considerable number of potential learners, registered to your academy.  A healthy student retention program will guarantee a steady business model for your online academy.

Create Online Academy allows you to dynamically choose from a number of tools and plugins to create, launch and successfully sustain any kind of online course or digital academy. To know more about their online platform and the community of learners and educators already present there, log onto their website and explore the huge number of options available there for course creators and educators.