Learning retention may be an unknown term but it is much familiar from our childhood. How many of us remember what we learned in school or college? Can we recall all that we learned? Certainly not. But we do remember certain concepts, lessons, life lessons, formulas, laws, etc. Why is it so? This is because these are there in our permanent memory.
Our brain doesn’t transfer everything that we learn into our permanent memory. Remember the time when some of us cleared our exams by studying just the night before the exam. But if asked to write the same exam within a few days then the results would differ.
This is the concept of learning retention. When we are reading it for the first time we retain only a percentage of it. To master it we revise multiple times but still, we tend to forget it in the long run unless it gets embedded in our memory. We can recall things better if we have higher learning retention. That is why kids are made to repeat the same thing multiple times so that it gets embedded into their permanent memory.
Now let us replicate this to corporate learning. Do you think that the method of rote learning would work in corporate training? Can we just make the employees sit for one-week training and bombard them with information and can we expect them to remember everything in return? It will destroy the whole purpose of training. And now that most of the businesses are turning towards LMS (Learning Management System) for training purposes it becomes even more important to ensure learning retention in eLearning.
So we know that it is important to retain what we learn but how do we ensure this. Well, there are a couple of ways to ensure this:
- Understanding: It is good to have an understanding of the concepts instead of memorising the facts.
- Interactions: Discussions with peers are the best way to retain things. It becomes an experience that stays there in our subconscious mind.
- Practicing: Practice makes a man perfect. The more you practice the more you tend to learn and it becomes a part of your life.
- Diversification: Diverse modes of learning such as audio, video, mind maps, images, infographics, etc help to retain things for longer.
Now let us see how LMS incorporate these methods to make employee training a true success:
Course Creation for better learning retention
- LMS enables businesses to add multiple courses with diverse sources of information and references.
- Personalized learning lets the employees adapt to training courses.
- Microlearning within the courses enhances and enriches the course content.
Discussion Groups
This lets the employee interact with each other and brush up on the skills that they are learning. It increases employee engagement and thus makes the training more interactive.
Gamification
The tests, quizzes, self-assessments, etc. check the practicality of employees’ training. It keeps track of employees’ learning in terms of how well they can implement what they have learned.
Thus LMS helps businesses in training their employees in a real sense.
Employees cannot be trained by forcing them to read through jam-packed content that is filled with every possible information. It will rather decrease their proficiency and make the training uninteresting. But on the other hand, LMS makes employee training more effective, interactive, innovative and engaging that also has high learning retention. Therefore having an LMS for employee training is the best option in present times.
