Learning Retention In An Online Environment

Your training program’s efficacy is at stake if your students are unable to retain information. Fortunately, involvement can increase learning retention. Find out how eLearning can assist you in laying the foundation for a great training experience.

3 Ways To Enhance Retention With eLearning

There will be a lot of work for you to do once you begin offering training in your firm. Sometimes it seems as if you’ll finally make it through if you receive approval from top management, build fantastic communication with Subject Matter Experts, and create courses that are jam-packed with knowledge. However, that is a completely incorrect assumption to make. The fact is that training can make a significant impact for your company, but only if the trainees properly absorb new knowledge and remember it for an adequate amount of time. And this is where memory, or the ability to retain information, comes into play.

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What Is Learning Retention?

Learning retention refers, in its most basic sense, to the length of time that you are able to maintain information in your memory in order to put it into practice over time. This concept pertains to memory and originates in the fields of brain research and cognitive psychology. However, what is meant by “learning retention” is more similar to a stage during which a person is able to recall and apply newly acquired knowledge. Your capacity to remember freshly acquired information will be proportional to the strength of the newly formed connections in your brain.

Then, Why Should One Be Concerned About Learning Retention?

The fact that retention of information does not occur automatically. Moreover, it doesn’t stay forever. Because we are all students at some time in our lives, we will meet with fresh material on a daily basis. The results of research, however, provide us with discouraging information: we forget as much as 70 percent of what we learnt just the day before. Because our brains are unable to store this information in our long-term memory, we will eventually forget it.

When you were in high school or college, did you ever try to cram for your exams? When you wanted to have a great finish to that semester, it was helpful to stuff your brain with a lot of data and concepts the night before. But when seen from a more distant time frame, you probably remembered very little to nothing at all. When it comes to employee training at a company, that is in no way a viable alternative. The memorization of worthless knowledge in a repetitive manner does not provide any results and is a waste of both time and money.

It is essential for students to immediately put what they have learned into practice as soon as possible in order to improve their ability to remember what they have studied. Because of the convenience of online training, it is now possible to give workers the chance to demonstrate their expertise without the attendant risks, costs, or investment of additional time or resources. Next, we’ll take a look at the process of how to do this.

Your Key To Learning Retention: Interactivity

The National Training Laboratory’s Cone of Learning model states that active learning, in which students are intimately involved in the procedure and interact with the material in a variety of ways, is the most effective for retention. Therefore, you should place emphasis on making your training materials interactive and enjoyable for learners before doing anything else.

Knowledge will become incredibly “sticky” and seamlessly ingrained for daily practice through interactive online courses. The ability for learners to ponder on training material, play with it more, test themselves, and successfully digest knowledge You can dramatically boost learning retention by including interactivity into your course in one of the three reliable ways listed below.

The 3 Ways To Enhance Retention With Online Learning

1. Diversify Your Course Content

Monotone classes fail to engage students and stimulate their minds. Every course should have a variety of training modules to guide students through all stages of information acquisition and to diversify the learning experience.

Here are several techniques that can be used at this stage:

• A free-form/essay question following each module. Encourage students to share their comprehension of a topic by having them complete such formative assessments throughout the course. Students have the capacity to consider new information, form opinions, and communicate their ideas. New information thereby becomes “theirs.”
• Reminding the students of the material you just taught while using the spaced repetition technique For instance, include this overview at the start of each module and list the main points at the end. In this method, you can encourage students to memorize material and to recall it at regular intervals.
• Microlearning. There is a bigger probability that learners will absorb and remember the material better if you introduce new, complicated information to them gradually. Contrary to cramming, you make information stick in small, whole bits rather than forcing-feeding it everything at once. Micro-courses are very practical if you want to review a certain subject.

2. Practice With Real-Life Scenarios

Dialogue sims are realistic situations that simulate conversations, such as customer service interactions, business negotiations, and interviews. Dialogue simulations can be used to test employees’ procedural knowledge or teach them in communication skills.

For instance, a fire safety course featuring a firefighter persona will significantly enhance your compliance training. As a result, you add storytelling aspects into your instruction. This will improve the learner’s ability to remember the very important rules and add more perspective and vitality to such a serious subject.

Real-life situations also enable your staff to grow from errors, and after all, they are among the best teachers. Thankfully, your students can practice in this risk-free online setting right now. For a very long time, they’ll remember how to do things correctly, but their errors won’t cost you anything.

3. Test Knowledge With Quizzes

You ought to connect theory and practice to further enhance learning retention. The well-known and enjoyable method for doing this is through interactive tests.

Online tests act as mini-games that challenge your students to make decisions, match definitions, arrange related objects, and more. In other words, taking tests helps us form stronger associations and better connections.

Quizzes give students the chance to test their knowledge while also engaging in fun learning activities. You can ask students to use their knowledge in made-up scenarios if you want to make it seem more realistic.

Conclusion

It won’t take much work to create online courses, tests, and dialogue simulations, but they will improve learning retention. With the right application program, creating these eLearning materials is not too difficult. Continue learning about online education with us and see how it can improve corporate training!

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