You’ve got your LMS set up, but learner participation is low. We run through some easy ways to up engagement in your learning platform. 

Build it and they will come doesn’t always work. 

Not when you’re working with diverse groups of learners, remote learners, and learners with varying pressures in their day-to-day job. 

What you should be striving for is a learning space that encourages development, rather than learners being left feeling like they’re drowning in compliance training. 

How do you do it? 

Well, you need to keep learners at the heart of everything that you do. 

To achieve that, here are some really easy tips you can adopt in your own learning platform for actionable steps to improvement. 

💡 Pro Tip 

Treating your LMS like a product is a good first step because then you can think like a marketer. Our marketing team share some key insights into how they would market an LMS to improve LMS adoption. 

Why learner participation is important 

Quickly, learner participation is essential to your learning programme success because if your learners aren’t actually engaging, then they’re either not learning at all or not going to retain the information well enough for it to be useful.  

It’s one thing to sit through learning content, but actively participating can improve learning retention and so it’s key to engage learners in order for you to hit your learning objectives.

And of course, for your learners to hit theirs too. 

Key methods to improve learner participation

Your main job when working in L&D is creating content. But there’s a wider role to be played too in regards to when it comes to tweaking your learning platform. 

Here are some tactics you can try to better encourage your learners to take a more active role in their learning. 

Offer feedback 

Providing constructive feedback and encouragement throughout a learning course is vital for increasing learner participation. 

More importantly than that is allowing your learners to feedback too and truly shape their own learning. 

Offer feedback forms, polls, or 1:1 calls to take feedback, and give real-time feedback to your learners via quizzes and assessments in a way that’s encouraging and positive. 

Enable peer learning and connection 

Some learning platforms deliver learning and that’s it. 

Other learning technology however can give you engagement tools and peer learning opportunities. 

Related: Easy ways to build learning culture in the workplace

The benefit of this is keeping learners hooked to the platform as it becomes a learning hub, and social space. 

Whether it’s forums or playlists, discussion boards or mentoring opportunities, you can find loads of extra tools and features with the right learning management system. 

💡 Pro Tip 

Totara’s core LMS comes with Engage which is purely focused on delivering learning experience tools. That means with their platform you can access all the core Learn functionality for course delivery and reporting, with the added benefit of engagement tools like workspaces, forums and more. 

Recognise every contribution 

Not every learner is going to show up in the same way. Some learners will be fully engaged and take their time on the platform to explore new and relevant courses. 

Others will just do the learning they need to do and that’s it. 

Both of these learner types should be commended. 

From certifications and badges, to points and even just notifications congratulating users on completing key milestones; there are plenty of ways to praise your learners. 

Create personalised learning pathways 

Personalised learning isn’t just a trend. Or at least, it doesn’t have to be. 

There are easy ways to personalise the learning experience: 

• Use different dashboards for different users to promote learning that’s relevant 
• Make use of recommendation engines to serve more learning content that might interest your learner 
• Create the same learning in different formats so users can choose what suits them best 
• Add rules so that learning has to be ‘unlocked’ to progress

Related: How to deliver personalised learning at scale

You can also add in more customisations with the right LMS partner. 

For example, we worked with edt on the Early Careers Teacher programme to create a learning platform that suited their learning delivery needs. As part of this, that included giving the option to consolidate or extend learning based on previous experience or knowledge in a particular aspect of a course or module. 

Read more about our work with edt 

Add a competitive element 

Implementing gamified learning experiences can boost employee engagement by up to 48%.

So adding some elements of competition could be a really good option for you. 

Whether that’s storytelling elements, point allocation for key actions or even just a badge when you complete a course; all of these gamification elements can work to drive better participation.

💡 Pro Tip 

In our gamification plugin, you can access unlocked badges, point allocation and leaderboards. All of these features will help you create a sense of competition between peers. 

With this in tow, you can serve notifications around new badges and leaderboard changes which can promote returns to your learning platform. And learners may be more inclined to participate when they know they’re going to get something out of it at the end of it too. 

Improve learner participation with learning technology 

The clear solution to learner participation is choosing the right LMS. 

No matter who you’re currently working with, you should consider switching platforms in order to give your learners more out of their learning. 

Simplify the admin side of your LMS and spend more time where it matters: creating better learner experiences for your employees. 

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