Introduction
According to the latest Community Brands research, 51% of association members rank continuing education as the most important membership benefit. With the right best practices and a little time, your organization can ensure your continuing education program is a valuable member benefit and a driver of non-dues revenue.
Keep learners invested in your learning program. Read our blog for tips to discover the best learning management system (LMS) for your continuing education program and best practices to effectively create programming.
What is continuing education?
Continuing education is a program or learning activities designed for adults who are looking to gain new skills, knowledge, or certifications after completing formal education, such as a high school diploma or college degree. The goal of continuing education is to help individuals stay current in their professions, advance their careers, or even switch to a new field. It typically takes the form of short courses, workshops, seminars, or certificate programs.
Continuing education programs are especially important in professions that require licensure or certification, such as healthcare, law, and accounting. These professionals must regularly take continuing education courses to maintain their credentials and stay up to date with the latest developments in their fields. However, continuing education also appeals to lifelong learners who want to keep growing personally or professionally.
How to choose the right learning management system (LMS) to support your continuing education program
According to the latest Community Brands research, organizations must innovate to maintain their competitive edge with professional education. To remain relevant, organizations should provide new learning opportunities.
To streamline continuing education course management and support the entire learner experience, your organization can consider leveraging a learning management system. When researching for the best learning management system (LMS) here are the top four factors to consider:
1. Offer live and on-demand in one learning platform
The latest Community Brands research found learners want to consume content in a variety of formats, particularly in short videos, online courses, webinars, and hands-on experiential training. You need an LMS that can support your learners’ needs by offering both in-person and virtual learning formats.
Providing live and on-demand learning options in one LMS will ensure your continuing education program appeals to more learners, boosting your accessibility, and helping you reach a larger audience. With an LMS that supports both virtual and in-person content, you’ll deliver a seamless learner experience, remove staff process inefficiencies, and save costs by consolidating systems.
2. Personalize the learning experience
Your learners are different, coming from diverse backgrounds and skill levels. They will have different learning preferences based on their background. As you search for the right LMS, look for a platform that allows you to tailor the learning experience for everyone in your continuing education program. Do so by letting your learners choose which topics are most relevant to their personal education or needed for certification.
Personalization ensures that each of your learners feels their unique needs are being met by your continuing education program, which enhances satisfaction and boosts motivation. Try personalizing the learner experience with your LMS by leveraging microlearning. Microlearning is an educational strategy that breaks down content into small, manageable chunks that learners can consume at their own pace.
3. Leverage automatic processes
With the right LMS, you can ensure your data integrates seamlessly to your association management system (AMS). With data integration, your content can automatically synchronize between your LMS and AMS, delivering the latest courses and content. Staff can also leverage the automatic credit submission feature to ensure both learners and staff always know how many credits a learner has completed. Finally, search for an LMS that offers an auto-archive feature, that quickly converts live webinars into on-demand content.
While Zoom is a great platform for webinars, it doesn’t offer functionality like course synchronization, automatic credit submission, and auto-archiving for webinars. You need a robust LMS to meet the needs of varied learner preferences and keep your continuing education content fresh.
4. Gamify learning
Gamification has been proven to boost engagement by making learning more interactive and fun. Your continuing education program can incorporate game-like elements into your LMS to motivate your learners and encourage continued progress.
Here’s how gamifying learning can help your continuing education program:
- Badges and achievements
Award badges or points when your learners reach specific milestones or complete learning modules. - Leaderboards
Create a healthy sense of competition among your learners by awarding points and showing how they rank against their peers. - Quizzes
Use gamified quizzes to help learners test their knowledge and immediately gain feedback to understand where they need to improve.
By integrating these gamification features, you’ll foster a sense of accomplishment and drive learners to stay engaged and complete your continuing education courses.
5. Duplicate courses and reuse content
As you search for an LMS, look for one with the capability to duplicate different resources within the administrative side of your LMS. See if you can take one of your courses and duplicate it to create a working template. Having a course template will make it much easier to create new course content.
Additionally, you’ll want to look for an LMS that offers the functionality of rebroadcasts. Rebroadcasts allow your staff to take a previously recorded event and reuse the content in a new way. You can incorporate Q&A checkpoints and credit functionality, but the content is pre-recorded, and you set the course to play on a certain day and time in your LMS. Using rebroadcasts helps you broaden your learner audience, meeting the needs of various time zones and also stretching your original programming.
6. Use your LMS data
One of the biggest advantages of using an LMS is the wealth of data it provides your continuing education program. As you track learner progress, completion rates, and engagement levels, you’ll gain valuable insights into what’s working and what’s not.
Here’s how leveraging an LMS and your data can help you improve your continuing education program:
- Identify bottlenecks
Pinpoint where your learners are struggling or dropping out and refine your course content accordingly. - Track learner engagement
Analyze which modules, courses, or activities are most engaging, so you can replicate those strategies elsewhere. - Measure ROI
See which courses are most popular and whether they’re leading to desired outcomes, like certification or skill improvement.
By leveraging LMS analytics, you can continuously fine-tune your continuing education program to ensure it’s as effective as possible.
7. Ensure your LMS is mobile accessible
Your learners are always on the go! Make your continuing education program accessible to all learners regardless of location by ensuring it’s optimized for mobile devices. A responsive LMS allows learners to access materials anytime, anywhere—whether they’re commuting, traveling, or simply away from their desktop. Look for an LMS that offers mobile-friendly courses, optimizing your course content, quizzes, and videos for smaller screens.
8. Offer certification tracking
Many of your learners enroll in your continuing education program to meet certification or licensing requirements. Your LMS can simplify this process by offering easy tracking and reporting.
Look for an LMS that offers the following tools:
- Digital certificates
Staff can automatically issue certificates once learners complete a course or pass an exam. - Progress tracking
Allow learners to track their own progress toward certification or license renewal. - Transcript generation
Make it easy for learners and staff to generate reports showing completed courses and earned credits.
An LMS can also send reminders when learners are nearing certification expiration dates, helping them stay compliant and on top of their professional development.
9. Use support services
Finally, as you seek an LMS to enhance your continuing education program, you’ll want to consider how readily available technical support is for your staff and learners. While you can hope your staff and learners won’t need to use technical support, the reality is, they will likely need the help of your LMS software vendor.
While selecting your LMS vendor, it’s crucial to evaluate their support services and discuss their technical support policies. Can they readily answer questions from your learners throughout the day? Who can your staff contact in case of an emergency? Getting these answers will help you choose the best LMS for your entire continuing education program.
Discover how Freestone LMS can enhance your continuing education program
Ready to take your continuing education program to the next level? It might be time to consider a robust learning management system (LMS) to empower your staff and learners. With Freestone LMS you can create, manage, and deliver a variety of continuing education course offerings, driving learner engagement and non-dues revenue.
Work smarter, not harder with Freestone when you use intuitive tools to duplicate courses, reuse content, and stretch your current programming.
Learn more about continuing education
learner engagement, streamline administrative tasks, and provide data-driven insights to improve your program over time. Whether you’re just getting started or looking to enhance your long-standing continuing education program, the strategies in our blog will help ensure you deliver an impactful and engaging learning experience.
