If you run a learning program, you know how powerful it is to keep your learners engaged with your online content. Not only do learners achieve greater levels of success, but your learning business continues to grow. According to our data, however, learners average 98% fewer sessions in a learning platform after they complete their study plan.
That’s one of the challenges we set out to tackle with BenchPrep Engage: how do we keep learners active once their study plan is complete? We believe that distributing timely and relevant content to learners both during and after a program is the key to keeping them engaged - but we also know that not every learner or learning business is the same.
As a result, configurability is critically important in a microlearning product. So as we built BenchPrep Engage, we made sure you'd have control over how to distribute your content. We designed the platform to be flexible enough to solve even the most complex learning uses cases while helping you achieve your program goals. By expanding the scope of configuration possibilities beyond just correctness and difficulty of questions, we were able to open up a whole new world of parameters.
This blog post will cover some examples of the most common content distribution configurations for BenchPrep Engage. While the product has an almost unlimited number of permutations for delivering continuous learning, these three options are a great way to get started delivering ongoing content to your learners.
Scenario 1: I want my learners to demonstrate mastery of content
If your focus is on having learners master content, you can use the concept of spaced repetition to your advantage. The idea behind spaced repetition is that you introduce time intervals between study sessions, and it’s been proven to be effective for retaining knowledge.
Learners who get questions wrong in the first cycle can receive those questions again in the next cycle, along with new content to master. Questions that were answered correctly can be introduced at a later time as well to see if those concepts have been committed to long-term memory.
In addition, you have the freedom to define mastery however you would like within the distribution algorithm. Whether it’s something as simple as answering a question correctly once, or more complex like answering it correctly multiple times over a set period, we can accommodate it within BenchPrep Engage.
Scenario 2: I want my learners to be more confident
Perhaps you are aiming to take a more confidence-based approach to learning in your organization to ensure that your learners are ready and able to act on the knowledge they have and are confident that they are correct and proficient. BenchPrep Engage can account for this as well.
A possible distribution logic setup for this scenario would be to continually send learners content based on what they are least confident in. As a learner's confidence changes, the configuration adjusts which questions it sends accordingly, aligning to a learner’s self-reported confidence in a category.
We find that when learners are asked to select their confidence level when answering a question, they will think about their answers more carefully. If they mark low confidence and their answer is correct, their confidence is improved. On the other hand, if they mark high confidence and their answer is incorrect, they are forced to reflect on what they know.
Scenario 3: I want my learners to stay up-to-date on relevant topics
If you are educating learners in an industry where relevant information is always changing - think medical professionals who had to quickly adapt to COVID-19 - then you’re going to want to take a more hands-on approach to content distribution.
BenchPrep Engage allows for this flexibility, too. If you have high-priority content that is updated or new that you want to introduce to your learner base, you can configure the product to deliver that content first. This way, learners are receiving content that is important and relevant to them in that particular moment, and they can immediately apply it to their day-to-day work.
Getting started with continuous learning
While the scenarios above are the most common, we can accommodate any number of specific requirements of your learning program within BenchPrep Engage. If you are interested in learning more about how we can help you with your continuous learning program, check out some of our additional content or reach out to us!