While online courses offer numerous advantages for learners, they often fail to achieve their desired impact due to low completion rates.
Research indicates completion rates for online courses typically range from 5 to 15 percent, with Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) falling even lower, between 3 to 6 percent, according to Research Gate. The lack of completion means learners are not fully benefiting from the learning experience.
Several factors contribute to these low completion rates. Let’s explore the most common reasons and potential strategies to address them.
Why Are Online Course Completion Rates Important?
For course creators and business owners, monitoring metrics like enrollment, conversion, opt-in, and completion rates is crucial. These metrics serve as indicators of your business’s performance and directly impact day-to-day operations. When completion rates are low, it suggests that students are not effectively engaging with your content and consequently fail to achieve the transformation you promise. This lack of success stories can gradually undermine your business’s growth and reputation. Conversely, achieving higher completion rates allows you to gather valuable testimonials and case studies, which are instrumental in driving business expansion and attracting new customers.
Factors Contributing to Low Course Completion Rates
Factors contributing to low course completion rates are quite different, objective or subjective, including unprepared students, disengagement, ineffective teaching methods, and external responsibilities. To address these issues, institutions must provide personalized support, employ engaging teaching approaches, and offer flexible learning options. By tackling these issues comprehensively, educational institutions can enhance student success and improve course completion rates. Let’s explore some of the main factors that lead to low course completion rates.
Technical Issues
The assumption that the new generation of students is proficient in technology is common. However, it is important to recognize that merely being adept at social media or video games does not necessarily mean having the necessary skills for e-learning. Proficiency in technology is crucial for students to complete assignments and use the full potential of online learning platforms. Limited technology literacy significantly impacts students’ learning experiences, often leading them to disengage from online courses due to perceiving them as burdensome rather than beneficial.
Instructor’s and Peers’ Support
E-learning presents a significant communication barrier compared to traditional face-to-face learning. Online learners often feel isolated, lacking peer collaboration and instructor support. Unless in a virtual classroom with live sessions, students are typically left to study alone. In traditional classes, familiar interactions like raising hands for questions or joining study groups are notably absent in online courses. Despite technology’s goal to connect people globally, it imposes specific limitations in this context.
Lack of Motivation
Online courses are primarily designed for students to learn at their own pace, offering flexibility in study location and timing. While this flexibility is a significant advantage, it also relies heavily on students’ motivation. One major drawback is the lack of accountability, with no oversight on task completion. Distractions, especially social media, further hinder students’ focus. Poor time management increases the likelihood of dropout despite the cost-saving benefits and convenience of online learning. The situation can be fixed by providing students with a clear understanding of the results they will get by the end of the course material without fluff.
Lack of Structure
A potential cause of low completion rates could be the absence of a structured framework in self-paced online courses. If you don’t know the plan you will hardly follow it, right? The absence of a predetermined schedule or timeline may lead students to become easily distracted or lose motivation, making them lose interest. This lack of organization is a serious challenge, particularly for those who are used to discipline and structure.
Limited Accountability
Self-paced online courses lack accountability mechanisms such as coaching or collaboration groups. The absence of structured support can lead individuals to lag or lose motivation. The diminished sense of responsibility will eventually lead to no motivation and zero progress in learning. Note that even paid courses and money spent on subscriptions may not motivate learners to finish the course. A simple example is gym memberships, which often end up as a waste of money.
Strategies for Improving Low Course Completion Rates
Use Multimedia
Learning should be fun or at least enjoyable, even for business and science topics. Incorporating multimedia elements like charts, images, audio, or videos in bite-sized portions into lessons can have a significant impact. Even a small change, particularly adding videos, can make a difference by providing students with an informative break, reducing their stress, and motivating them to continue learning.
Additionally, using videos to visualize lessons can enhance student comprehension, saving time for both teaching and learning. Recognizing the importance of time, many courses now break down content into shorter segments with 5-10 minute videos, considering students’ shorter attention span.
Create a Virtual Community
Many educational institutions heavily rely on technology, yet one aspect it struggles to replace is human communication. Poorly designed online courses can lead to student isolation and, ultimately, dropout rates. Establishing a small interactive chat space and an online collaboration platform for learners can help overcome this issue. This could range from a live chat room to a basic forum or comment section. Such a platform enables students to exchange ideas and pose questions related to the lessons.
Many learning platforms integrate social media accounts like Facebook or Google+ to enhance communication between students and instructors. So does Saima, with its collaborative note-taking feature, bring together students around the video material to engage and discuss it. Facilitating these connections fosters a sense of community, increasing student engagement with the courses.
Set a Deadline for Completion
We all love deadlines, don’t we? In fact, they are often described as a negative concept because they help us prioritize tasks and manage time accordingly. In our hectic lives, it is common to delay tasks without clear deadlines. Just imagine you are a freelance writer with over 5 projects running simultaneously, and one has no deadline. When will you get to the project? Never!
Establishing a completion timeline and sending reminders helps us stay committed to your course and the desired outcomes.
Saima’s Mechanism Against Low Course Completion Rates
Saima employs a personalized approach to enhance course completion rates by revolutionizing video-watching experiences. With Saima, comprehension levels increase by 30%, saving 65% of time and boosting productivity by 30%. Here’s how:
Adaptive Video Speed: Adjusts to individuals' listening paces, eliminating pauses and rewinds.
Speed Boost: Smoothly increases speed to maintain engagement.
Silence Removal: Removes awkward silences, enhancing audio clarity.
Voice Boost: Ensures consistent volume, prevents missed words, and enhances overall learning efficiency.
Saima also addresses collaboration challenges with its real-time video note-taking and sharing features. Users can capture key insights directly on the video, with notes being time-stamped and leading back to specific sections. This makes reviewing easier and promotes interaction. The collaborative environment is further enhanced by features that allow users to react to notes, tag each other, comment, and start discussions.
Notes can be taken with screenshots or voice notes and can be downloaded as PDF documents for offline usage. The dedicated workspace, Saima HUB, stores every video, note, and comment, organizing them into folders and enhancing productivity.
Conclusion
It is possible to succeed in online learning even with statistics blinking in red with their low completion rates. Saima’s innovative solutions redefine learning, breaking barriers to low course completion rates through personalized video-watching enhancements and fostering student success. By addressing the key challenges of online learning and providing tools that enhance comprehension and collaboration, Saima significantly improves course completion rates, ensuring that learners fully benefit from their educational experiences.