Hello,
I have implemented moodle on my comapny's site and we see something perculiar. Customers come to take our e-learning courses (all free) and after the first course, the enrollment drops 50%, then between the 2nd and 3rd course, again 50%. I wanted to know is this something common, is there a problem with my content or user experience? What type of questions should |I ask to identify the problem here. Thanks
Gidi,
Welcome to the world of online learning where, in many cases, the reality is, "If I build it they won't necessarily come."
There are so many issues to consider, that I recommend working with a professional who has experience building online course for business purposes. Here are some considerations I would look at:
I often ask three simple questions to help determine the effectiveness of a course or workshop. You might start with these.
- Floyd
Hi Gidi,
It's pretty normal for most people's first attempts at elearning not to succeed. Implementing successful elearning in any context is a complex process and every case has its own unique circumstances that can influence it. Many universities are reporting dropout rates as high as 70% for elearning but this can be for a broad range of reasons and contributing factors not related to curricula, e.g. people who opt for elearning courses often do so because they have conflicting commitments.
For more successful curriculum development, the best advice I can recommend is to inform yourself as much as possible about learning and teaching theory, and practice in general, and how computer mediated communication, i.e. elearning, affects this. One area of research that seems to have some promising avenues to explore is Randy Garrison's Communities of Inquiry project at the university of Calgary: http://communitiesofinquiry.com/
In a corporate or professional setting, you'll probably find Reflective Practice (Donald Schon) and the professional development programmes for medical practitioners at McMaster University in Hamilton (HG Schmidt) helpful, as well as Etienne Wenger's work on Communities of Practice: http://www.ewenger.com/. All of these principles have been successfully implemented in elearning and blended learning contexts. This guy sums up Reflective Practice rather well: http://www.learningandteaching.info/learning/reflecti.htm
In implementing and developing elearning programmes, you're going to do a lot of learning yourself. I'd be wary of anyone who claims to have "the answer" or "proven" solutions for elearning issues. Learning and teaching is complex and it's difficult, if not impossible, to establish direct cause - effect relationships between curriculum development and learning outcomes. In this respect, we're all learning and we all depend on each other for finding promising avenues to pursue and share our findings.
Good luck and happy learning!
Hi Gidi,
there is an another angle which i guess should be considered..
overall along with other's suggestions, i would advise to look at increasing interaction with students..
Cheers
Nitin
Hi Gidi,
To add to what Nitin has written, have you considered putting a video of yourself (or the course instructor) on the main page of the course with a friendly welcome message? It really helps student to feel that there is a real human being out there that they can contact if necessary.
I have to admit that I didn't do it myself when I was running distance learning courses because I was so stressed out about talking to a camera. Since then I've realised how to get round the inhibitions a lot of us have about being filmed. Get a nice colleague (or a student or ex-student) to interview you about your course on Skype or similar. The interviewer will just be a voice "off". You'll feel a lot more relaxed and the result will be much more "natural" that talking alone in front of your computer.
I didn't do that, but I did respond to every student question within 24h. I write "respond" and not "answer" because I didn't always have the answer. Most of my courses were highly interactive: student to material, student to student and student to teacher... and there were always glitches and bugs. But I found with a fast (and if possible, funny) response students were very tolerant.
I found that in some ways I had a closer contact with students than face to face. I regret I no longer have the opportunity to run this kind of course.
Cheers,
Glenys
Before providing feedback is there a link so that we may review the content or have I missed it?
