Engaging, relevant content? Tick! Mobile-first learning platform? Tick!
The next step is to make this available to your learners, and ensure that adoption and usage are sky high. The implementation is a vital, often overlooked phase, but to state the obvious: a new learning platform won’t be a success unless people actually use it.
So what you can do to drive adoption? We’ve gathered top tips from our clients and we’d love to hear yours, so please write to us at hello@edume.com and we’ll feature them in the next blog on this topic.
1. Your mobile learning platform deserves a solid marketing and communication plan
It's worth spending time planning how you’ll let your learners know about the new all-singing, all-dancing learning platform. This deserves as much attention as a new product launch. In all your comms, clearly state how this learning tool will help them - higher sales, increased efficiency, better earnings.
-
Make people feel special when you invite them: you've been specially selected for this new training opportunity.
-
Use teasers and countdowns to generate hype and excitement before launch.
-
And then there’s the medium. Of course, you can (and should) send emails to your user base, but what else? We’ve seen that the best implementations use a variety of touch points. You can put posters up around the office, include information in company newsletters and the intranet, and create WhatsApp groups to share information about the new app. The latter is also a great forum to collect feedback and answer people’s questions. If you have a live event taking place, use the opportunity to let your captive audience know about the new learning platform, and better still, if it’s an app, encourage them to download it and get started there and then!
2. Who's putting the 'L' in your mobile LMS?
As with any good project, you need named team members with defined roles and responsibilities. Who’s the project manager? Who provides the content and keeps it up to date? Who’s taking care of communication? And who’s Chief of Snacks? Ensure that each team member is clear on how much of their time should be allocated to the learning initiative, and include relevant success metrics in their KPIs.
Perhaps you need to reach a large, dispersed audience such as a field sales force. Your sales people’s visits to company HQ may be rare, but they will have regular contact with an area manager or a local team leader. So get the local managers involved from the outset! Include them in content development and testing, and request them to try out the new learning platform and provide feedback on content, as well as ease of use. Make sure the managers inform their team members that:
-
a shiny new learning platform awaits them,
-
it's going to make them more productive, more efficient, and better looking,
-
they're available should anyone have questions and/or feedback.
3. Give your online learning a personal touch
Online learning sometimes gets a bad rep. Can you believe it? We couldn’t either, but we heard people talking about it lacking the personal touch. It doesn’t have to be that way! You can create a connection between learners and their team leads / training managers and build a sense of community. This will increase engagement and is particularly useful if your workforce are dispersed.
For example, one of our clients recorded a welcome video as part of the first micro-lesson, where the training manager introduced the new initiative, explained how to use it, and clearly outlined its benefits. This friendly, personal approach was a great start to the course and encouraged learners to keep going. And if you're interested in practical tips for in-house video production, check out our recent 3-part blog series.
Get some healthy competition going by sharing names and photos of top learners in the learning platform. You can also create friendly rivalry by letting learners know how their team is doing compared to the others. Kent vs. Surrey, or Marketing vs. IT...let the battle commence!
Another great way to make learners feel part of the initiative is by inviting them to share their tips and advice. You can use a simple online survey, disseminated through the learning platform to collect these. The best ones can be published in the learning tool - seeing your ideas on the big (sorry, small) screen is a great motivator.
4. Use carrots and sticks to increase microlearning completion rates
What incentives can you offer to encourage adoption? Of course, once your learners see the content, they’ll be hooked and microlearning yields 12% higher completion rates, but sometimes a carrot is needed to get over the first hurdle of downloading the app or creating an account. Here are some ideas - what else can you think of?
-
entry into a prize draw
-
certificates of completion, either printed or digital depending on your learner base
-
mobile data or airtime upon lesson completion
-
make learning part of the KPIs, and make learning part of the criteria for bonuses to be awarded
It's crucial to finalise your incentives before launch, so make sure it's all approved so that you can send clear, consistent messages to your learners.
Don't forget about appropriate incentives for the area managers and supervisors who successfully encouraged their team members to get started.
5. User test before rolling out your mobile learning tool
Start by testing the new learning tool with a small sample of learners, and identify any sources of friction early on. For example, the cost of mobile data was identified as a concern for one client’s learners, so they're providing airtime credits for those who have completed a certain number of microlessons.
In another case, downloading the app proved to be the biggest hurdle, and our client was in the process of distributing work phones to employees. So, they downloaded the app onto all the new phones before they were handed over, and employees were given a 1 minute explanation of how to use the app and how it will help them to increase their sales and earn higher commissions.
We hope you found these tips useful! We work with each client to ensure a successful rollout, which then results in business impact, as seen with clients including Uber. Want to see our mobile learning platform in action? Write to us at hello@edume.com
Happy learning!
