Northpass 101: Engaging Your Learners

Welcome to Northpass 101, a new series designed to help you get the most out of your learning program. 

We’ll be sharing tips, tricks, and best practices with the aim to help you better leverage our platform’s capabilities. Ultimately, we want to help you in your journey to design a learning program that works for your business. 

These are short, practical, no nonsense posts packed with tactical advice. Let’s dive in!

Tips to Keep Your Learners at the Edge of Their Seat

At Northpass, we believe in putting learners first. It’s the foundation of our Learning Ops framework and it underpins everything we do. 

So, it only makes sense to start with some tips for better engaging your learner base:

1. Keep Courses Short and Sweet.

Courses should be digestible and direct. 

Get to the point, deliver value as quickly as possible, and aim to keep individual courses under 10 minutes in length. Fewer sections with fewer activities result in higher course completion rates and keep the learner receptive to new information. 

Trying to tackle a bigger topic with more information? Break it down into sub-topics and leverage Learning Paths to string a series of short courses together.

2. Build Around Achievable Milestones.

Your learners should feel like they’re making progress — Do not create roadblocks. Try to create milestones along their journey that give your learners a sense of accomplishment at relatively frequent intervals.

Don’t have a massive test at the end of a long, grueling course. Break it down into three sections, each with its own short quiz. 

Congratulate your learners for completing each section and encourage them to build on what they’ve achieved.

3. Leverage Personalization Where Possible.

More often than not, training tends to be oriented in a one-size-fits-all way. 

Be different! Make training feel more personal and relevant with personalization. With Properties, you can now personalize course content at scale. 

Start small by including your learners’ names on the welcome screen and advance by building towards truly data-driven content throughout the course authoring process.

Personalizing the learner’s experience is a simple yet effective way to increase engagement and overall satisfaction.

4. Deliver a Mix of Multimedia Content.

Visuals help learners better comprehend and retain learning content. 

Did you know? Research has shown that learners retain 95% of information when watching a video vs. 10% when reading text. 

However, don’t just create one long onboarding video — There needs to be some variety in your content mediums. Offer different types of content to avoid monotony and keep learners engaged throughout their journey.

Northpass’ course authoring engine accommodates all sorts of multimedia content. You can even use images as answers to multiple choice quiz questions. 

Stay Tuned for More Northpass 101 

We’ll be back soon with more tips and tricks to help you get the most out of Northpass! 

In the meantime, shoot us a note if there’s a specific topic you’d like to learn more about: