5 E-learning Pitfalls and How to Avoid Them

The time of e-learning is here. And the fact that you’ve landed on this article probably means you know that, too. Online courses can be both convenient time-savers and high-quality knowledge boosters for users, so it’s important to make sure you’re getting the most out of your e-learning platform. Check out five typical pitfalls online educational companies usually come across, and learn how to overcome them.

Poor onboarding

There is still some scepticism about online learning, which is why the first interaction with your potential learners is crucial. Having a diligent, simple but informative onboarding process, will help walk your students through the system and introduce them to its specificities. Add automated sign-in forms, user-friendly guidelines, and easily accessible online support to facilitate your learners’ first steps into digital education.

Lack of interaction

If you want to teach your students the basics of project management or Greek philosophy, you might be tempted to upload tons of plain text and hope it will do the job. But if we’re being realistic, only 2 out of a thousand students would be brave enough to sink their teeth into the overwhelming textual content. For the rest of your learners, you’ll have to add engaging interactions – videos, games, quizzes, or any other multimedia elements that can be helpful. These additions will make your courses more fascinating and motivating. The upside is, you’ll grab your students attention and encourage them to stick with you for a longer period of time. The downside — you’ll need to find another place to store that 1200-page treatise on Socrates.

Wrong LMS

Alongside the growing e-learning market, there is an increasing number of LMSs, all claiming to be “just right” for your company. The truth is, not all of them are beneficial. Using the wrong LMS can become a pain in the neck, especially if your business grows too fast and needs a more powerful system, or your current LMS lacks personalization and user engagement. An obvious solution would be to choose an LMS that actually fits your company needs. And if you want to avoid getting bogged down by an endless search for a perfect system, hire experienced e-learning tech specialists who can find the best match for you.

Wasted learners’ data

Now that you’ve chosen an LMS, be sure you’re capitalizing on all the stored data. With the help of a learning management system, you can receive information about your students’ learning preferences, how much time they spent completing the course, and bottlenecks they encountered while learning. As you know, these insights are valuable to further improve your educational platform. Moreover, you can strengthen your analytical muscles with some integrations like Yet Analytics or Watershed, which will do all the hard work in collecting and systematizing learners’ data.

Lack of automation

Speaking of integrations, the days of manually adding students to a course, keeping a close eye on their learning progress, and processing their payments one at a time, no longer exist. Now, you can do these and other tasks with the help of various integrations for e-learning platforms. Automating the educational process helps with organization and simplifies the steps for both sides. Plus, it saves you tons of time, which can be spent on other areas — say, completing an online course for yourself.

Having a thought-through educational platform can result in an influx of new users and a growing student engagement rate. If you’re trying to overcome some of these e-learning pitfalls, or simply want to take your online course to the next level, check out how our e-learning software development team can help you.