Online Learning Lessons: Be Mindful About Messaging (and Platforms)
Christian Nimsky
Young woman checking messages (Photo by Chad Madden on Unsplash)
This post is the second in my Online Learning Lessons series where I share a few of the things we learned while revamping PADI’s online learning platform. This post is a quick and natural follow-on to the idea of Owning Your Customer Experience in an online learning context. From what I have seen, a lot of online learning platforms have you register with email, and they communicate with you by email. This has a few implications:
Email is great for Gen-Xers who were trained on it. Probably Boomers as well.
Younger generations have been shown to not utilize email as heavily as past generations.
Families with very young children tend not to have email addresses for those children, and may use a single email account such as “thejonesfamily@emailprovider.com” to register their kids for an online course. If you rely on email as a unique identifier your individual progress tracking can be hamstrung by such “family” accounts.
Some societies around the globe tend to be mobile-first and even older users may not have email accounts.
Email delivery issues can affect key status or “next step” messages.
Email May Be Cheap, But It Has Other Costs
At PADI, we saw evidence of #5 regularly show up in the form of customer support requests, and so we built additional ways for our online students to find relevant product codes or status in their dashboard or app view without relying on their email as much. Fully detaching from email is a long journey but PADI has taken the first steps.
Be Mindful About Messaging Choice
Just as it’s easy to “bolt on” a learning platform and end up with a kludgey overall user experience, don’t forget that implementation teams may also seek the path of least resistance by suggesting email when implementing sign-on and messaging.
While technically easy and (on the surface) cheap, be careful about letting these teams make email a de-facto standard just because it’s what they happen to use personally. Make sure they understand the students you are trying to serve and build for the messaging platforms they use.
As an example, if you are serving students in China you need to start understanding WeChat as a platform.
Be Mindful About Platform Choices and Future Flexibility
If your online learning initiative is still early stages, I’d consider looking at a messaging platform that can communicate via email, text and app-based push notifications with APIs that can feed website messaging banners or other third party platforms like WeChat.
If your platform is mature, instrument it and cross-check with your customer/tech support to see if you are experiencing some of the issues above. If so, how much are they costing you? It might be worth a platform update depending on the situation.
There are even ways to hook your learning platform’s messaging up to a CRM if ongoing outreach is part of your business model as well, but that’s a different topic.
What have you found to be the most effective way to communicate and engage with your online students?