Three Ways to Get Your Students to Finish Your Online Course
One of the most frustrating parts of teaching courses online is looking at your class metrics and seeing that people aren’t finishing what they are starting. You want your students to succeed, and seeing that they’re not getting there can be incredibly demoralizing.
First, here’s a quick reality check: The industry average completion rate for online courses is 20-30 percent. (And some numbers indicate the true rate of completion may more like 10 percent!)
If your students are finishing at rates higher than that, you should be delighted—your course likely is engaging and helpful to your students. That doesn’t mean there isn’t room to improve, but you should feel good about this!
Data, as well as my own qualitative research, indicates that some of the common reasons people do not complete online courses includes:
Course content is stale or outdated;
Students are disengaged;
The learning platform is confusing; and
Sometimes people get what they need from the course before they finish.
There’s also the issue of what I call “The Buying Fallacy” when it comes to online courses.
With The Buying Fallacy, people purchase a course and feel that the act of the purchase means they’ve made progress. A certain portion of your students will always fall into this category—it can be incredibly difficult if not impossible to motivate these buyers to progress.
How to Increase Completions of Your Online Courses
Maintaining a 100% completion rate for classes is unlikely, so let go of the perfectionist dream, and your mileage will vary on what completion rate you should aim for, depending on your industry, course format, and the goals of your course. However, you should have a plan on what you want to see.
Here are three steps you can take to push people to finish your class.
Step 1: Examine Your Online Course Analytics & Determine Where You’re Losing Students
Are your students reaching a specific module or lesson in your online course and not just going any further? Take a look at why and ask questions:
Does the flow of the class change dramatically?
Are the videos suddenly far longer or shorter than the previous lessons?
Are there missing supporting materials that can re-enforce this “sticky” part of the course?
Look at your curriculum plan (you have one, right?) and examine how the section previous to the problem lesson compares. Make sure content is interconnected and that one section builds on the next. A problem we often encounter is that the content has a change in the skills required or competency without a logical build to that change. This is where should explainer videos, links to related previous lessons, or progression checklists can also be invaluable in moving students forward.
Dig deeper into this unique challenge in an earlier article I wrote on identifying your students’ skill level when they start.
Step 2: Trim & Break Up Stalled Lessons or Modules in Your Online Course
We can also have the opposite problem where a section can be redundant, or be so off camber that people are confused at why they are doing what they are doing.
If this is the case it is probably time to just get rid of it or edit it significantly. If you’re not ready to let go of this darling, an approach I’ve used successfully is to move this extraneous or overwhelming content to a “Bonus Lessons” section at the end of the course. We’ve done this in our Squarespace SEO Hacks course with a lot of success. It even is set to unlock once students have progressed a certain amount, so it’s a little gift without being overwhelming.
One of the things we have struggled with is trying to give all the knowledge about a subject and sometimes you need to be especially judicious about what people actually need to know to not only succeed, but feel motivated to continue.
Step 3: Add a Pop-Up Q&A Session to Your Online Course
If you host an asynchronous class, as most online courses are, scheduling a pop-up session in which people can ask questions or get their problems addressed can help significantly with completion rate.
It allows people to talk through where they are getting hung up, learn where their peers have questions, and it also gives an incentive to work through the course.
As the instructor, a pop-up live session is a chance for you to collect valuable feedback and see if your students are missing key components. For example, Sarah recently hosted a pop-up session for our Squarespace SEO Hacks course and we realized that we need to add a couple of short how-tos to round out the course. This is invaluable feedback and well worth your while.
Final Thoughts: Increasing Student Completion Rates in Online Courses
Let’s be clear: You’re never going to have 100 percent of your students finishing your online course. However, when we truly believe in what we’re teaching, and the success it can create, working towards further engaging our students so they make progress is an important goal.
If you’re ready for a personalized course completion strategy, reach out to discuss our Online Course Evaluation program—a 360º look at your course and its strengths, trouble spots, and opportunities.
