Everyone has been coached multiple times during their life, be it professionals, practitioners, managers, or leaders. Coaching is nothing but a form of directed development wherein a person (preferably called coach) helps train and guide the learner to achieve a specific goal, be it personal or professional. The coach would have more experience and expertise as compared to the learner and offers guidance and advice as the learner learns.

In this fast-paced world, where information is power, people are always in a frantic urge to learn something or the other. Monotone is not something that suits the lifestyle of today. High school students and those preparing for competitive exams do have various options outside in the form of coaching institutes that help them prepare for the exams, though many of them choose online courses nowadays. Coaching institutes also provide software or hardware courses to working professionals, which in turn can help boost their career stats delivered online. By 2019, atleast 50% of all classes will be online.

Online teaching businesses follow a business model as any other subscription service. The learners pay a certain monthly fee, after which they get access to the content depending on their needs. It varies from digital study material to online mock tests and live instructor videos. However, like every other business, learners do subscribe but seldom return to their online learning portal due to many different factors.  

Attributes that Drive Learner Engagement Some vital characteristics make physical learning stickier than online learning,

Social Commitment: Your commitment is to a few other people around you than just yourself making it almost difficult to abandon the physical learning classes.

Visibility: You are seen by your coach and other learners in every session you attend. People around and your coach can easily see your constant absence.

Attention: While in the class you are unlikely to engage in any other attention seeking activity

Personalized Coaching: The teacher has an eye on the learner and is addressing their specific learning needs in a customized manner.

These physical classroom training attributes ensure that there is a forced or participative but constant engagement with the learners. To reduce the online learner’s churn, we need to get these attributes incorporated in the online learning space.

Better Online Learner Engagement

The critical question is to understand how to bring in the attributes of the physical learning environment into the online learning environment effectively. Here artificial intelligence and machine-learning play a critical role.

Let us now understand four strategies that help online teaching companies reduce participant churn.

Machine Learning the Behavior

Coaching is not specific to a particular population. Customer bases may include high school students, students preparing for competitive exams, working professionals looking to learn software or hardware courses, people looking for coaching in non-academic areas like lifestyle activities, and many more. Each of the learners has a specific behavioral persona while learning online. AI can help you learn these behavioral patterns across learners. You can classify your online learners based on the behavioral patterns learned. For each segment of the learner, you might have a different methodology to deliver your content such that their participation increases. Very similar to a classroom training wherein the teacher first attempts to understand students in the class as per different levels of their understanding of the subject and then alters his way of teaching such that most of the students in the class learn effectively. Better engaged online students are more likely to return to the session than the ones who didn’t find the course delivery engaging enough.

Gamified Commitment

With the help of AI/ machine learning and social media, it is possible to celebrate the online learner’s achievements with their best buddies so that there is a social commitment just like the one in the physical classroom. Small learning in the online course that the learner has felt good about can be identified using machine learning, and the learner can get an option to celebrate it with friends. Simple progress, such as attending 3 out of 10 classes is a great reason to celebrate. AI can give statistics for online students to celebrate mini victories such as, “You are in top 33% of the students in the history of this class on your speed of answering questions”. These simple gamification methods implemented using AI potentially drive higher student retention rates.

Personalized Course Recommendation

Highly engaged online learners tend to dive deep into the subject, and they love getting directed to the ancillary courses that might be relevant to understand the focal course better. With machine learning, you can learn what specific education needs that each online learner has and accordingly recommend them other courses. You may charge or offer them other courses at no additional cost to create more value for the students. This recommendation is just like the teacher in the classroom who understands each student’s needs and asks them to go through specific material for their better understanding of the subject.

Student Engagement Score

Advanced machine learning algorithms can assess the in-stream student behavior online and score how well are they doing on their attention during the course. AI can create learning interventions for those who are hitting the lowest acceptable levels of attention during the session. Making this public in the classroom has a power of building up a positive social pressure ensuring the student is pushed to learn. The flexibility that is offered by online learning becomes the enemy of learning online, and AI can counter this challenge effectively. With better attention span during the class, the students are more likely to see the value being delivered effectively, making them attend classes consistently and sign-up more courses.

Online students not engaged effectively online may end up being churned customers for your business. Churning customers severely impacts the ability to have a predictable and repeatable business month on month and year on year. Using innovative data-driven decisions and methodologies, you will be able to control the customer churn rate and retain customers for your business. To discover more, we suggest you try out Datoin.