Learning Retention — How To Make Information Stick?

A3logics
6 min readFeb 3, 2022

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Learning, the term signifies a whole chunk of age for students and more importantly the teachers. With the dynamics of the world, changing continuously, eLearning platforms are all set to take over the education sector. While the idea behind enabling students to access their courses and get access to better resources is a win for the entire community, the fact that there are no physical classrooms and student-teacher interactions is a point of concern for both the providers and recipients of the services. Why? Because it has been observed that the retention rate of the content used on electronic devices is much less than what it used to be in person. If you are an eLearning enterprise and wondering what might be going wrong, you need to think about your choice of eLearning development companies that you are working with.

Sure, it depends on the content and what lessons you cover in your course module however, the overall experience of your learners will highly vary if the platform is not user-friendly and well developed. There are times when you being a training manager would want your employees to stay updated with what you have tried to convey in the learning sessions and boot camps. You are not wrong to expect as that is exactly the purpose of creating a custom LMS for your enterprise however, if the learning retention is not working in your favor, there might be something wrong with the way your content interacts with the learner. What can that be? Let’s learn in this post!

Also, Refer — 6 Advancements in E-learning Technology

What is Learning Retention? Why Does it Matter?

In simple terms, the ability of an individual to retain what they have learned is called retention power. You see, the human brain is a mysterious device that works in all directions, all the time. When we interact with something, it gets fed into our short-term memory, i.e it can be lost after a certain amount of time, for some that time is a day or two and for some, it is just a few hours. To retain something, you have to go through it multiple times or it should be effective enough to make room in the long-term memory of your brain.

Why does that matter in eLearning? Well, the association of the concept is clear, the more impactful your learning content is, the higher your chances to make room in your user’s brain. A successful e-learning platform is one that brings quality and efficiency to the user and if the information that you are sharing is not sticking, what’s the point?

Now, that is how retention works and honestly, there is no magic trick to enhance retention from the user-end however, a training manager and a solid LMS can make changes to the way information is shared with the user and hence bring the best retention rate for your eLearning software. That is also a reason why custom LMS development has become the need of the hour for every individual. But how does custom software help in making the information stick? Well, for that you will have to read the next section!

How to Enhance Learning Retention on an E-learning Software?

The idea behind providing learning content over the internet is to make sure that the overall learning experience is of ease for the learner. If the learning retention is law, you are somewhere lacking behind in creating an impact, and hence the purpose of your LMS or learning software is defeated. You might have seen people inclining towards a system like Talent LMS, the reason can be the great applications that it provides for learning retention. You can actually take a few additional steps to ensure that the information you share with your employees or students sticks and can be retained well. What are those practices to be precise? Find out below!

  1. Make Your Content Engaging

This is the obvious yet least understood factor by the eLearning enterprises. While it was okay to share literature in person, a user’s attention span is of great essence in online learning solutions and thus you can not fill the study material with lengthy and wordy papers filled with extraneous information. The content should be interactive and interesting for a user to actually invest time and energy. The more impactful your way of delivering content, the better are the chances of enhancing learning retention. A learning content management system is really necessary for creating such interesting material in different formats and hence, a good service provider can also be a role player in helping you get better learning retention.

2. Deliver a Quality UI

Usually, the way of conveying the content is the only thing that is counted as a factor for learning retention. Well, another factor that is less accounted for is the user experience and interface. When a user is offered a cluttered and congested UI with tons of options, it becomes a bit distracting. On the other hand, when you have a plain easy-to-use experience, you can focus more on the content and hence the attention span increased rapidly, helping you achieve a better retention rate. In simple words, the information sticks better when there are no distractions! For such applications, there are IT service providers who master in delivering custom enterprise software development.

3. Add Interactive Tests & Quizzes

Simply sharing videos and notes will never make the cut for you. You have to go one step ahead and publish a few interesting quizzes about the concepts that you share. That way, whenever a user goes through any module on your eLearning platforms, he/she will have to pay undivided attention to the concepts as they know they have to take on a quiz later. You can also innovate with audiovisual questions in your tests making them more interactive. No doubt you will need a well-defined and robust app architecture to have such features in your eLearning platform but if you aim to make the most out of the opportunity, you must look for extraordinary eLearning software development that can allow you to make the most out of the available resources.

These three things when combined with a smooth workflow and a fluent LMS can do wonders for your eLearning platform. Not to forget the elearning authoring tools can be of great help for you if you want to make the most out of your system and you must have appropriate insights on how you want to work on them.

Summing Up

Learning retentions is something that every enterprise must pay attention to and with these tips in your hand, you can surely improve the declining retention rate of your platform. In case the content creation is stopping you or you do not have enough resources to pull off engaging content, you can take LMS development services from our experts. We at A3logics have some of the finest strategists and counselors who can guide you towards a perfectly developed and robust eLearning software with enough content suggestions and templates to get you started. An integrated LCMS is always a plus in such scenarios.

Feel free to reach out to our team for a free consultation. Hope the post was of use for your enterprise, Good luck!

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A3logics

A3logics delivers value-added industry-specific business technology consulting, IT solutions and services to businesses across the globe. marketing@a3logics.in