7 Tips for Increasing eLearning Utilization

"If you build it, they will come," right? Unfortunately, this is rarely the case in elearning. You start by implementing an learning management system (LMS), selecting needed courses, structuring and organizing content but those are just the first steps to creating a successful learning program. In my role as Senior Customer Success Manager at OpenSesame, I speak to hundreds of companies about their top strategies to increase learner engagement and boost consumption of content.

1. Tie learning to company values: How can you ensure that company goals and values stick with employees long term? Use elearning to train on those values to help change behavior. For example, if  “Customer First” is a core value of an organization, then be sure every learner takes a customer service course such as Customer Service Success or Customer Loyalty.

2. Internal communication: Communicate early and often with learners about your training program. Communication to them through your employee newsletters, email notifications, company intranet, or using LMS alerts to the learner community. Highlight information such as new courses, how to access training, or who to contact if anyone has questions.

3. New hire training: Incorporate elearning into your new hire onboarding process. Great choices for new hire courses include topics such as sexual harassment, Data Security, Diversity, or Microsoft Office. Be sure to collect feedback from new hires on how how easy or difficult it was to go through the onboarding process and consume required training.

4. eLearning open house: Invite employees to an elearning open house to demonstrate how to access the learning program, demo courses, and answer their questions. Use their feedback to improve your current learning program.

5. eLearning “book club”: Host a monthly conference call to discuss this month’s highlighted elearning course, similar to a book club. Discuss the learnings from the selected course and encourage conversation with prepared questions and prompts.

6. Social sharing: Create channels for learners to interact, discuss, and socially share about elearning. For example, if you are using Slack, Chatter or HipChat for collaboration, create a channel for elearning and engage with employees by regularly posting questions of learners: what training do they want? what worked well? what course is highly recommended?

7. Rewards & recognition: Recognition can be as formal or informal as is appropriate for the company’s culture. Here’s a few fun ways we’ve seen learning heroes recognize their learners: silly giveaways, even simple items such as pens, stickers, t-shirts, mouse pads, etc. No need to be too serious. What about a coffee mug that says "I Taught Myself MS Office”? Consider gamifying the elearning experience by holding monthly contests for most courses taken, or highest participation by department or team. If there isn’t a budget for small rewards, a simple idea could be to award framed certificates for noteworthy course completions.

These are just a few tips we have seen used successfully to increase engagement and utilization of learning programs, but the possibilities are endless. We’d love to hear of other fun and creative ways that you’ve used to promote your training program in your organization. Contact us at (503) 808-1268 or info@opensesame.com.