Our data shows that learners average 98% fewer sessions in a learning platform after they complete their study plan. Couple that with the forgetting curve, which shows that without repetition, people immediately begin to forget what they’ve learned, and businesses and eLearning enthusiasts alike have a real problem on their hands.
How can you keep your learners engaged and ensure they’re retaining knowledge and actually working toward mastery?
We created our microlearning platform, BenchPrep Engage, to help you solve this problem. Recently, Marlon Davis, our Vice President of Product, hosted a virtual office hours session where he tackled your questions about BenchPrep Engage. Here is a brief summary of that conversation:
Question: What does the BenchPrep Engage product do?
Answer: BenchPrep Engage is a microlearning platform designed to help learners retain their knowledge after a course ends. It combats the forgetting curve and delivers regularly-spaced education cycles to learners. With BenchPrep Engage, you can supplement your existing training and development offerings, extend the learner relationship, create continuing education programs, and build new revenue streams while helping your learners achieve better outcomes.
Question: How do I know if my company is ready for BenchPrep Engage?
Answer: It all starts with defining your use case. Know your audience and know the business problems that you need to solve. If you need to create new revenue streams and extend and create continuing education programs, then BenchPrep Engage is probably a good fit for you.
Another important consideration is to ask yourself how much it costs to attract a new learner to your business, and how much does it cost to retain an existing learner? For most companies, it can be up to five times more expensive to attract a new customer. So if retaining learners is a priority for your organization, BenchPrep Engage can definitely help. Delivering microlearning between courses keeps your learners engaged, and it can also help you introduce or sell that next course to your learner so they can continue building skills.
Question: Is BenchPrep Engage a stand-alone product, or do you have to get BenchPrep Ascend to get BenchPrep Engage?
Answer: BenchPrep Engage can be used stand-alone or together with BenchPrep Ascend, our market-leading learning platform. BenchPrep Engage works best with Ascend in your learning stack. Think of it as a one-two punch: BenchPrep Ascend allows you to ace that high stakes test, while BenchPrep Engage enables the knowledge to live on so that true mastery can be achieved. Or in a simpler way, BenchPrep Ascend helps the learner Ascend the skill mountain, while BenchPrep Engage engages the learner from there to help her retain the knowledge.
Question: What inspired your team to create this new product?
Answer: Our original impetus for developing BenchPrep Engage came from a customer request. The customer wanted to take advantage of certain training synergies that could only come from coupling a microlearning solution together with an LMS system. The microlearning solution would then have access to the strengths and weaknesses and various confidence levels uncovered during the learner’s initial training. This allows for a richer experience and a more potent outcome for the learner because the content is not only delivered via spaced-repeated to reinforce the learning, but the delivery of the content can be smarter and tailored to shore up weak areas.
Question: How often should you engage your learners after they’ve completed a training?
Answer: Before I can truly answer this, I first need to introduce two concepts. The first is spaced repetition. The second is confidence-based learning. Spaced repetition helps us fight the forgetting curve and improve retention through ongoing delivery of learning. Now, even if you’ve never heard the term before, most of us know what this is, and have known this concept since elementary school.
Spaced Repetition is what makes flashcards so powerful. Flashcards helped us retain definitions back in school and is the reason why many of us still know things like “Mitochondria: the powerhouse of the cell.” The idea is this: by repeating and continuously exposing ourselves to content over time, we are significantly more likely to retain that content and commit it to long term memory. Think of spaced repetition like muscle memory. It’s trained performance through repetition.
Confidence-based learning gives learners real, valuable feedback about their performance and gives them a better understanding of their proficiency. All of us know that knowledge is much more than one-dimensional, “Right vs. Wrong”, “Up vs. Down”, Left vs Right”. Confidence-based learning is not necessarily a practice, but rather a recognition that knowledge isn’t linear, and that other measurables, like confidence, should be considered when determining the success or demonstrated understanding of learning.
So now, back to the original question: What do you recommend for the repetition interval for maximum retention? The forgetting curve models show up to 79% of memory is lost in 30 days, with a nonlinear drop off. Anywhere inside that range, say 1 to 4 weeks, will help combat this curve, depending on depth of engagement. There are actual formulas to help determine this, and those formulas can be used to determine the ideal intervals based on content in BenchPrep Engage.
Want to know more about our new product, BenchPrep Engage? Check out the on-demand recording of Marlon’s office hours session.