Associations: Three Ways to Upgrade Your Learning Game This Leap Day

We’ve got three different ways associations can make an extra day count: Upgrade your digital learning offerings to help generate member value, improve efficiencies through automation and use data to gain valuable learner insights. Here’s how you can tackle each one:

1. Spice up your content

Membership associations are often awash with content. After all, your organisation is a go-to resource in your industry and you likely have multiple subject matter experts within your professional circle.

Having content isn’t usually a problem. However, organising and presenting it in an effective way online can be. That slide presentation your passionate spokesperson brings to life at face-to-face events might fall flat when members scroll through it on a screen. Pages of text may not grab and hold the attention of a busy executive catching up on their continuing professional development (CPD).

You want your members to be inspired to access the learning they need and to be engaged throughout so they complete their course of study and want to go back for more. You also want to test your members’ knowledge, assess their understanding and award appropriate grading or accreditation because of their learning.

Spicing up your content helps with both these aims. You can increase engagement by using formats appropriate to the information type. A ‘how to’ instruction piece might be best explained through video, while long-form research might be easier to consume if it is broken into bite-size amounts of information and presented in varying formats including text, graphics, video and more.

You can also add quizzes to your content to help hold learners’ attention and check their understanding. You could even look into using gamification to improve the learner experience. Gamification uses tools often associated with game design, such as progress tracking, scoring and awarding badges. All learners are different—some want to get a maximum score or complete all the levels, while others may want to see everything on offer or be awarded for making progress. Gamification taps into these impulses, helping generate interest in activities and hold learners’ attention.

2. Introduce automation

We may get an extra day this month, but we’ll still question where the time goes because there never seem to be enough hours in the day to get everything done. Learning administration can be a real time drain, swamping small teams that are often over-extended and constrained by budgets that won’t stretch to boost resources.

Automation through an online learning platform can help. Pre-set release conditions help guide members through their learning journeys without staff intervention. They do this by delivering content only when members have met relevant criteria.

With release conditions you don’t have to make content available manually, thereby saving you time. Release conditions also help generate personal learning experiences for members, as their journeys are determined by their actions and needs.

Another time-intensive activity that can be streamlined through automation is communication. You want to maintain contact with learners during their CPD, but that’s difficult to do when you have a lot of members.

Every course has standard touchpoints, and it makes sense to schedule communications automatically in the learning platform when they occur. For example, you can set up a welcome message for members joining a course and a congratulations message for when they complete it.

You can get more sophisticated with your automation by scheduling messages that are triggered by more complex events. For example, if a learner starts a course but then lets their learning slide, you might want to send them a message to check how they are and offer support.

You can create these standard messages once and set rules for when they’re sent to ease the pressure on your administrators and tutors, whilst at the same time staying in touch with members.

3. Dig into Data

Getting to grips with learning data might be on your to do list and this leap day could be the perfect time to start.

The good news is that learning platforms can offer many data possibilities—you can gain valuable insights through analytics to help you improve and grow the value of your learning offering.

You may want to start by understanding how many members have accessed, begun or completed courses or modules. You might want to compare completion rates across different years or groups. You can then build up to more sophisticated insights that explore levels of engagement, or perhaps how much members interact with content. All this analysis helps you develop a bigger picture of membership learning, which you can use to plan continuous improvements and to maximise the return on your learning investment.

For example, on D2L Brightspace, you can access simple dashboards in the learning platform to generate the reports you need in order to track learning progress. You can also create custom data sets to support your own particular reporting needs.

Efficient, high-quality membership learning

Make the extra day count this leap year by generating member value, improving efficiencies through automation and gaining valuable insights into members’ learning. Use your learning platform to explore facilities and features that can help you enhance member experiences and ease pressure on your trainers and administrators. You might make one or two small tweaks or start a more in-depth improvement programme. Whichever approach you take, spicing up content, introducing automation and digging into data can help enrich learning journeys and increase efficiency in the administration of learning.

Or, if your time is more limited this leap day, why not spend an hour attending our brand-new live Learning by Association webinar? This Thursday evening, 29 February, explore how to digitise, optimise and transform your learning strategy by hearing from experts in the field, such as the Royal College of Physicians Ireland. Sign up here! Can’t make it? Register anyway to receive the recording!

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