Since the Covid-19 pandemic, the way we learn has shifted permanently.
Whether you run a training business, are a course creator, or work at an educational institution, e-learning has likely become a staple part of your model over the past couple of years.
E-learning has many benefits for students, allowing them to flexibly develop their skills without any geographic restrictions. It’s estimated that around 99% of businesses now provide some form of e-learning to their employees!
However, those running e-learning programmes may find it challenging to keep students engaged throughout the course. Thanks to their interactive nature, quizzes provide an ideal way to boost e-learning engagement across a wide range of sectors.
Let’s look at how you can integrate quizzes in your business…
Understanding e-learning engagement
According to Continu, e-learning engagement is “the level of involvement, interaction, and active participation of learners in online learning experiences”.
Basically, this is a measurement of how motivated and invested students are in your e-learning content. It’s best measured not just by active participation, but by how enthusiastic learner participation is too!
E-learning engagement can be split into three key components:
- Emotional – The feeling students have throughout their e-learning journey. The more enjoyable the learning experience is, the more motivated students will be to perform.
- Behavioural – How actively learners attend the course, participate, and complete the necessary tasks.
- Cognitive – How much effort learners put into learning the course content and developing their knowledge, performance, and skills.
These need to be viewed as a collective, rather than as individual parts of the learning journey.
The challenges of e-learning engagement
Student engagement can be much trickier to manage in online education settings than in real life. It’s also harder to pinpoint what these are when the students aren’t in front of you…
Common challenges relating to e-learning engagement include:
Lack of attention span
Learning remotely can come with a lot of distractions.
Family commitments, childcare, and pets all need to take priority at home, and notifications from texts, calls, and emails can cause learners to lose focus.
We all remember the viral video of a child walking in to the dad’s office while he was on national TV, right?
A perceived lack of support
e-learning can have a reputation for being less personal and interactive than learning together in a physical space.
This will typically come down to the teaching style. If educators aren’t asking for feedback, they will not understand if students are struggling. Simultaneously, students won’t feel they can reach out and ask for help.
Reduced accountability
E-learning can feel more anonymous than being in a physical training space or classroom.
For self-paced courses, e-learning can quickly become passive, which makes meaningful retention of course materials more difficult.
Even on live calls, it can be tempting for learners to have their cameras and microphones off and sit in the background.
Different learning styles
Every learner will engage with educational materials differently – for example, some through repetition, others through visuals or practical exercises.
If people can’t see the purpose behind what they are learning, they are unlikely to engage with the materials effectively. Making e-learning more interactive is a key way of appealing to different learning styles.
Limited social interaction
Many e-learning environments don’t prioritise students engaging with one another about course material. This lack of peer learning can have a huge impact on e-learning engagement. Being able to talk to fellow classmates – even in a casual manner – improves learning retention.
How a quiz can boost engagement in e-learning situations
Ultimately, you should always try to provide a fun and inclusive e-learning environment that gets every learner to interact with your course material in an intentional way.
One of the best ways to do this is by using a quiz!
There is a wide range of quiz platforms out there that help to boost learning and engagement.
ScoreApp, for example, is an easy-to-use quiz builder that allows you to create subject assessments and scorecards that provide every user with personal assessments, feedback, and guidance on their current knowledge level.
A quiz will provide students with:
1. Interactive learning experiences
Quizzes are a form of active learning. Each student has to individually participate to complete tasks that are relevant to the course materials.
Students tend to start disengaging with e-learning when it is passive. This is partly because there are no consequences to not being actively involved in the e-learning journey.
For example, simply viewing the slides of a presentation or listening to a lecture, without being asked any questions about the material being covered, is a form of passive learning.
Quizzes, on the other hand, are interactive. They challenge every learner to demonstrate and apply their understanding of a topic at regular intervals, which improves retention and understanding of the subject being taught.
The style of the quiz you choose will depend on the course materials and requirements of your users but could include:
- Multiple choice, true-or-false, or fill-in-the-blank questions to quickly capture how information is being retained.
- Scorecard quizzes to assess student knowledge in a specific area.
- Short answers so participants can explain individual concepts in their own words.
- Scenario-based questions, so you can evaluate how learners would apply course information in a real-life setting.
Regardless of the type of business you run or the institution you work for, there are dozens of ways you can implement quizzes to boost e-learning engagement for your employees or students.
2. Knowledge retention and reinforcement
Quizzes help reinforce knowledge and improve memory retention through spaced repetition: repeatedly reviewing information in increasing intervals.
By breaking a subject into bite-sized chunks, learners have the opportunity to demonstrate their expanding knowledge at regular intervals throughout the course. This allows them to reinforce the knowledge they already have, and learn from past mistakes as they will work through the same questions more than once.
This is a much more effective – and less overwhelming – learning method than being tested on an entire subject once it has been completed.
3. Instant feedback and self-assessment
Quizzes provide learners with instant feedback on their knowledge, so they can easily assess their understanding of certain topics and track their progress through their e-learning course.
Not only can this boost confidence by demonstrating the knowledge that is being retained, but it can also help learners understand their mistakes and learn from them.
4. Increased motivation and competitiveness
Quizzes can incorporate gamification elements such as scores and leaderboards into e-learning environments.
By turning your course into more of a competition, you can increase the motivation and engagement of every learner. You can even use competition to boost collaboration and communication between students.
For example, if you are hosting live calls, put students into small break-out groups to work on a quiz together.
After all – everybody loves winning!
5. Personalised learning paths
Quizzes can be used to create personalised learning paths based on individual performance.
By facilitating regular quizzes, each learner can quickly identify their knowledge gaps and the areas they need to work on.
Quizzes can also be set up to provide targeted content to each person, giving them the best support on their learning journey.
6. Enhanced data and analytics
Finally, quizzes can provide educators with invaluable data on learner performance and engagement.
Quizzes can quickly capture:
- How well each student is mastering specific topics
- Which questions people struggle with the most
- And even which questions take the longest to answer.
All of this can help educators adapt and improve their course materials and teaching strategies to meet the needs of the students participating.
Create your engaging e-learning quiz with ScoreApp
Quizzes are one of the most effective ways to transform a passive, disengaged, and distracted e-learning experience into an active, engaged, and motivated one for every type of learner.
With ScoreApp, you can create a range of quizzes, including interactive scorecards that help you test learner knowledge in specific subject areas.
Even if you’ve never built a quiz before, setting up your Scorecard couldn’t be easier, with over a hundred free ready-to-go templates to customise for your educational environment.
And if you aren’t sure where to start, check out some of our favourite ScoreApp quizzes across industries as inspiration to help motivate your learners at every stage of their e-learning journey.
Get started today and create your ScoreApp quiz today for FREE.
