Online Learner Engagement: Get Students to Finish [EN]

This course contains the use of artificial intelligence.

People do not abandon your course because the content is bad. In most cases the content is fine, and they stop opening it in week three anyway.

You have improved the material twice and the numbers have not moved

That is the tell. If better content were the answer, better content would have worked. What is actually happening is the same failure that makes somebody stop caring about a job they chose voluntarily, and that failure has been studied for decades — just not in education. Gallup's twelve elements read as a completion checklist the moment you substitute one word: I know what is expected of me. I have what I need to do this well. In the last week somebody noticed something I did. Somebody here cares about my progress. In the last six months somebody talked to me about how I am doing. There is somebody here I could message. Not one of those items is about the quality of the material.

What this course covers

Thirty-eight lessons built on engagement research rather than on teaching method. First the phenomenon itself: what engagement is and why it is not satisfaction, loyalty or motivation, the measurement instruments including Gallup's Q12, how to run the measurement and what to do with the answers, the twelve elements taken apart individually with an action against each, the three generations of engagement practice and the move from engagement to experience, and what a high-engagement culture is made of. Then motivation: what a motive is, how motivation and results connect, what a culture actively obstructs, how Google and Netflix approach it, loyalty and how it is measured, the twelve motivating factors, and Motivation 3.0 — why rewards damage the kind of work that requires thinking, and the three elements that replace them. Then the learning environment: how adults take in information, the platform stack, programme design, working a live audience, the participant life cycle, and evaluating both the people and the course. Then the journey map: the three environments that shape experience, an audit by questionnaire, the phase before somebody commits, the first day, the middle where most people disappear, ending the relationship properly, and the alumni community with the referrals and returns that come out of it. Then feedback: why nobody gives it and everybody wants it, false beliefs and stress and lack of skill, the difference between feedback and assessment, six steps, asking in the other direction, feedback loops at scale, adapting to personality, and recognition that works without prizes. Finally mentoring: the types and the research, matching a pair and the critical success factors, the first meeting, rules and boundaries, closing on purpose, and seven situations you will meet.

Five blocks were recorded for a workplace audience, and that is the point

I would rather state this plainly than have you discover it. Engagement has been studied far more seriously inside organisations than inside online education, for the straightforward reason that companies pay for the answer. Q12 rests on a sample of millions of people; online learning has conversations about completion rates and very little comparable data. So this course borrows the instrument that works and applies it where it has not been applied. Of the thirty-eight lessons, roughly six speak a vocabulary you will have to translate — internal roles, one-to-one meetings with a line manager, self-managing organisations. The other thirty-two describe a person, not a job title.

Who is teaching this

I am Mike Pritula. I built the people system at Preply as it became a unicorn, and I have worked at Wargaming, iDeals and Alfa-Bank. More than 1.6 million students have enrolled in my courses across 185 countries, and over 150,000 specialists have gone through my programmes. I hold PHRi and SHRM-CP certifications and represent HRCI in more than ten countries.

What is included

• Lifetime access to all 38 lessons

• Active instructor support in the Q&A section

• A Udemy Certificate of Completion

• Working material: the Q12 instrument, the twelve elements with an action for each, the journey map and audit questionnaire, the six-step feedback model, the peer-to-peer recognition design, and the mentor matching criteria

• An engagement instrument with decades of validation behind it, rather than tips

Where to start

Open your own numbers and find the exact lesson where people stop. Then read the twelve elements and work out which one is missing at that point. It is almost never the content. Enrol now and start today.