Discussion Forum: Boost Completion Rates from 20% to 90% With Collaborative Learning

Course completion rates are one of the biggest challenges facing L&D teams. It doesn’t matter how many hours, days, or weeks you put into preparing great learning content - if your learners aren’t seeing your courses through to the end, you’ve got a problem on your hands.

Unfortunately, the average course completion rate is hovering at 20-30% across the industry, and a lot of learners are struggling to make it all the way to the finish line. This means the vast majority of people aren’t retaining the information they need to succeed and grow.

So, how can you support your communities of learners to engage with all of your amazing content? It all comes down to boosting engagement through Collaborative Learning, and giving people a way to interact with each other during the learning process. 

Now, we’ve built a tool to help you do just that - scroll down for the video if you’re impatient :)

Building engaging content is a challenge for most L&D teams

As we found from our analysis of common training problems across over 244,000 learning reactions, many learners find training content to be too general, full of distracting mistakes, and written without immediate problem-solving in mind.

It isn’t hard to see why this might be the case: developing tailored and engaging content takes too long. Even worse, there’s no easy way for L&D teams to improve content over time.

1. Developing immediately engaging content takes too long

As we’ve noted before, it takes a huge 130 hours and $22,178 to create a single hour of eLearning. With most L&D teams working on their own, this makes it a real challenge to create content that is engaging and tailored to the needs of specific learners. 

The end result? Most companies have to resort to investing in a library of costly SCORM courses. Either that, or they rely on standardized training content with little to no interaction. 

2. There’s no easy way to improve content over time

The best learning content is a living thing, and is always improving in response to suggestions from learners. With never-ending requests coming from all directions, and with an ever-growing list of new skills and new information to focus on, achieving this is often too hard for L&D teams. 

The result is a catalog of obsolete courses that are built months if not years ago, and which are based mostly on outdated information. Every single piece of this content has an expiration date, creating a greater risk that learners will switch off, or worse - they’ll make decisions based on old information.

So, is there a solution? Of course. Does it involve L&D teams doing more work? Of course not. 

Introducing our Discussion Forum.

4 ways our Discussion Forum help your teams complete courses and retain knowledge

People want to contribute to making your learning content as great as possible. All you need to do is empower them.

Our Discussion Forum makes it fast and simple to support your teams to complete courses and retain a greater level of information. It does this by putting Collaborative Learning to work in letting people help shape learning content and engage with subject-matter experts.

Here are four ways our Discussion Forum increases engagement, course completion, and knowledge retention by leveraging Collaborative Learning.

1. Giving your learners a voice

Science tells us that the most effective way to absorb and retain information is to engage with other people rather than simply receiving information. Our Discussion Forum turns learning into an exchange, giving people the ability to ask questions and offer feedback on the material.

Having this feature available at every step of the course helps to ensure everyone understands the material, and tells you exactly where you need to offer further clarifications or additional information. It also puts human interactions at the center of the learning process, which is a key foundation of Collaborative Learning through peer engagement.

Discussion Forum gives your learners a voice, helping you  make every learning experience  interactive and collaborative, instead of top-down and one-way. 

2. Crowdsourcing the best answers

Our Discussion Forum encourages learners to ask questions on points that might be unclear. They can also contribute answers to existing questions, and can upvote the answers offered by other learners. This way, organizations can crowdsource the best possible answers to challenging questions using collective knowledge and subject-matter expertise.

The best answers appear on top, making it easy for people to find the information they need. This also highlights the value of learner contributions to improving course material, showing people how content can stay up-to-date and improve over time.

3. Engaging your subject-matter experts

Where learners have more specific questions, they can mention or tag an in-house subject-matter expert (or group) and ask them to weigh in. This way, your forum becomes a key part of the learning content, as it displays the answer to benefit all future course-takers who might have the same question.

With the Discussion Forum, your learning content is always improving, and always benefitting from the collective input of your learners. It becomes a living repository of information and guidance, rather than just a static, one-way resource.

4. Addressing learner questions quickly and easily

Our Discussion Forum also makes it simple to address and resolve all learner questions. From your dashboard, you can monitor all open questions and resolve them in batches.

This saves you time in connecting learners with the right subject-matter experts, and makes it easy to oversee how your learning material is improving over time.

Boost your course completion rate and knowledge retention with our Discussion Forum 

With Collaborative Learning features like our Discussion Forum, we help our users maintain course completion rates of over 90%, with learners completing an average of 11 activities per day. That’s the power of Collaborative Learning: you can turn employee training into a participatory exchange that is always improving over time through learner feedback.

Our Discussion Forum makes it easy for L&D teams to build engaging, relevant learning content, and offers a way to put learners in the driver seat. It gives learners a voice, creates an active community of learners, and allows your subject-matter experts to shine.

Interested in all our Collaborative Learning features? Check out our Relevance Score, Video Pitch Assessment, Reactions, and Authoring Tool. 

If you’d like to see it in action, book a free demo with one of our learning experts!