The habits of learning have changed. So given here is a list of some principles which you must adhere to make your learning platform to make it habit-forming. We have followed the ideas originally proposed by Nir Eyal in his popular book “Hooked”.
At the crux, of Habit forming products is aligning the core workflow of the user with the intrinsic motivation of the learner. How to break this down into some easy steps? Having a deep understanding of Usability and User experience can be make or break it.
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- Topic: Humans Of EdTech
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Things change a lot after any crisis in the surrounding. These crises can be anything, whether a pandemic or any war. These things have a direct impact on the learning of the person.
Like these days because of COVID-19, the world has seen a tremendous change in the habits of the people. Be it a student who is no longer studying in the usual offline classroom or an official who is doing work from home job.
The habits of learning have changed. So given here is a list of some principles which you must adhere to make your learning platform to make it habit-forming. We have followed the ideas originally proposed by Nir Eyal in his popular book “Hooked”.
At the crux, of Habit forming products is aligning the core workflow of the user with the intrinsic motivation of the learner. How to break this down into some easy steps? Having a deep understanding of Usability and User experience can be make or break it. ‘Habit-forming product’ does not mean –
- Large Feature
- Fancy Feature
- Tons of Development
- Some god given insight
- Extraordinary design or visual look
It’s a combination of all the above + deep user insight.
Let’s break this down into few steps
1. Habit Zone
The students who all have enrolled in your learning platform anyhow become your brand ambassador. This is good because it is free of cost and more and more students are getting added to the platform. As soon as the new learner gets into the habit zone the pricing part is flexible.
There are certain factors on which the transformation takes place from behavior to habit. They are:
Identifying the correct behavior is very much necessary, as this factor plays a very important role in it. There may be different learners, some may be a kind of auditory learner, and some may be visual learners. So differentiating students based on the style of learning is very important. And this is an important prospect for identifying the student’s behavior to have forming habits.
Eliminating the boredom or the loneliness of the student is a must. You must have noticed how YouTube and Facebook and of course other social networking sites up to some extent reduces boredom and loneliness. Try to remove the pain of the students as much as possible to have a habit-forming EdTech product at last.
As an owner of an e-learning platform, make sure that the student must use your product frequently. It is a possibility that you might not receive any benefit from the student’s end, but the product usage frequency should be high. From several studies, we find it we mark this factor as number one for transforming the behaviors into a habit.
2. Triggers
To sustain the behavior to come to where it becomes the habit of a student triggers play a very important role. They act as agents in guiding the students and let them know what to do next. But you need to be very careful while designing the triggers, as it should not kill the instinct of the student.
Listed below here are three of the most important triggers which act as the best guiding agents. They are:
The first one is the owned trigger. They are those triggers that are already present on the smartphone of the learner. This is quite useful as it lets the learner see the features of your product daily even if he/she is not using the product regularly.
The second one is the relationship trigger. As the word suggests, it is something that has a connection with human to human. If one student shows greater enthusiasm and completes his or her course successfully, the other student or his co-learner will also feel motivated or felt triggered and will thus try to complete the course as well. To increase engagement, we must instil the feeling of enthusiasm in the minds of the students.
The third one is the earned trigger. If you provide an accomplished graph or stats or such metrics which lets the student know how much time he or she has given to the platform. As in this way, the learner will be triggered and will try to spend some more time. You can display the amount of work done or assignments completed, as this will create a sense of achievement in them.
3. Action taken
To transform the behavior into a habit, the learner needs to cross the action line. Things like time management, amount of effort, and mental level are equally important to determine the behavioral level to learn and grasping things.
Listed below here are some motivations which will let the student perform an action or cross the action line. They are:
The students can seek social acceptance by accomplishing a certain goal or assignment. As in this way, their friends can reward them for achieving a particular goal. Just like people post on social media to get more likes similarly, the student can feel motivated by sharing their achievements with their friends.
Avoid the fear of failure rather than seek hope for accomplishment. Just like in a classroom, the backbenchers avoid failure and always look for some encouragement and hope. Some students are adept at some subjects, and some are good at something else. Not everyone can be perfect at a particular thing. Carrying the fear of failure may lead the student to be weak in the remaining fields of study.
The pleasure of learning is more important than getting bored or stuck in long and boring content. Enjoying learning is a must for every student.
4. Rewards
If you want the students to be motivated, then give them some rewards. If they achieve a certain goal, give them an unexpected reward. This creates a spark within the student to perform better in the next task.
Some rewards are:
The first one can be a community reward. It is a type of reward in which along with the top performer his/her friend will also get a reward for a good performance.
The second one is an informative reward. As in today’s world, students are hunting for more and more information. So the reward can be to provide them with the source from which they can freely seek all the required information.
The third one can be a personal award. It is a kind of reward which a student seeks on its own. It can be a lesson understood well by one of the best teachers and other such things.
5. Investment
The time spent on your platform by the student will let you make more money. Community will value EdTech products more as much as the student uses them. Let the students enroll in the courses of their choice.
There are some by which you can make the students enroll in your eLearning platform. They are:
You must keep track of the number of minutes spent on the platform to have a simple idea of which site is engaging for the students.
If we give the students some additional brownie points for submitting their project, then they will enroll and spend more time on your platform.
You can provide a volunteering option for the students. As there are cases where some students have problems with any concept, then the co-student can act as a helping hand and help him/her in solving the problem. The recognition that a volunteering student gets will let him visit your platform again and again.
Photo by August de Richelieu from Pexels.
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