So @abartunek, that depends somewhat on the kind of content type you have, but if you’re making things with e-learning tools like articulate, you can make custom “next” buttons that have special conditions like the amount of time spent on that slide.

You might want to take a look into that if you’re thinking that the time spent is important. The only thing there is that you’ll have to balance that with users going “did I really have to spend 30 minutes here?” to which you might reply, “OK, fair, but also fair: I kinda want you to spend more than 8.”

Hi @abartunek, a lot of our audience consists of salespeople and resellers, many of whom are fast clickers so they can get back to selling. In my experience there will always be a group that does the minimum required and locking down navigation just frustrates them and makes them want to avoid online training even more. Here are a few things we do to mitigate the issue, depending on the content and its purpose though:

• Chunking content to keep modules short--we opt for more and shorter modules over fewer larger ones. My audiences like to fit the training in where they can--between calls, etc. We shoot for a max of 15 minutes whenever possible and have some that are 2-3 minutes. The L&D team in our company that does training for Support, builds longer modules because their audience needs to schedule chunks of time off the phones to take training so it depends on whom you’re training.
• Continue buttons that require the previous section to be completed.
• Interactive elements with a purpose--as you mentioned. Interactive scenarios where the learner gets through faster by choosing the right answers, drag and drop exercises that make them think, simulations, putting steps of a process in order, ungraded knowledge checks woven in, etc.
• Reporting after the fact. If it’s an internal audience, sharing info. with managers about which people are spending time and which aren’t can be eye opening. If a manager sees a correlation between performance and whether their employee is serious about learning it can be helpful to get the manager’s buy-in. Which leads me to...
• Leadership buy-in and leading by example. This can be a tough one because leaders and managers are busy and sometimes don’t value training but engaging them in the process--asking them to complete the training, talk about the value of the learning, encourage their people to continually develop, etc. can make a difference.
• Requiring a passing score. Maybe badges for 100% or something.
• Having common go-to teams/SMEs that get hit up with questions a lot direct folks to the training when they get those questions. My team and our Sales Engineers are great about this--they redirect people to the training and other self-serve resources rather than just providing the answer.

I hope something in there helps with this common but annoying problem!

Thanks for all the tips! We’ve been experimenting with some of these but just need to find the golden one. I like the idea of giving a bit more responsibility to managers and reporting to them about who spends how much time on training.

We’ll definitely test it out some more!

Many of the suggestions I was going to list have already been mentioned, but one that I didn’t see is the reports. I will often times send a report to our Managers (or Executives) that includes the “time spent in course” it will often draw attention when some spend 20 min in a course and others are spending 13 seconds. Then I put that responsibility back on the supervisors/executives to follow up. 

Love all these suggestions! 

One element I’ve been experimenting with lately is leveraging the new Observation Checklists as Learning Objects feature. Admittedly, this is a niche strategy (in my case, I’m creating a course on troubleshooting platform problems, and have a component teaching our customers how to create a proper Support Ticket, which they will then have to do and be checked by our personnel to pass the course), and doesn’t always scale well (you have to have personnel like managers willing to evaluate the Checklist!). 

But I think there are some real advantages when the circumstances are right. 

• They’re practical -- in this case, the exact replica of what learners will eventually have to do for themselves.
• There’s skin in the game -- if you assign managers to check the learners, fast-clicking through the course will be obvious to everyone.
• They’re pedagogically sound -- if being able to *do* something is a course objective, what better way to achieve this than requiring learners to do it! 

@ryan.woods thanks for the additional suggestion! We would have to figure out how we want to use Observation Checklists for that but that is definitely a topic worth exploring. 

Hi,

This may be a little late to the table, but “gating” content as a strategy is mentioned above (strategies of slowing down a learner to complete an interaction, watch, or listen to something before allowing the next interaction to occur)...but you may want to pause and figure out a little more about your learners. I think if you allow the analysis to be continuous with your targeted audience, you stand to figure this one out.

After developing messages and content for people for years in Healthcare, I came back to a conclusion - that most of our workforce wanted to get done as quick as possible. So gating content was not going to always be welcome...ask any provider about a billable hour. But providers were not the only people consuming material with us, and so a healthy mix of approaches remained important.

We also know that if you dont engage an adult learner? Some of them will engage your material to purposely get through it as fast as possible.

Sometimes the message in a visually appealing, catch-y, “PSA two minute video” was so much more impactful than the deeply developed interactive.

My findings - sales and resellers in the broadest generalization - have similar threads of behaviour and seem to house more of the “competitive types” at our organization. Some gating of materials (when it comes to the right content) and gamification works. Blend them and trickle your content out with different mediums...but keeping with the same brand and feel...and you will find your folks more involved with their learning.

Ever try mapping the duration of how long a person is with the content across all of your learners? You may find that most of your folks are really being engaged and it is only a few that are trying to “burn the materials out”. More importantly, you can figure out if your assumed duration is being matched in the practice of people taking the learning.

Without a doubt, I would establish a solid best practice of developing a minimal completion criteria for your materials (a knowledge check, critical paths through interaction, quizzing, at minimal, an attestation). Having no completion criteria is a reason for the content that you were working on to be offloaded to content management / knowledge management spaces.

Hope this helps...