Goals, when implemented in an educational setting, can guide a student’s learning journey until they reach their desired outcome. By setting goals, students can measure the effectiveness of their study methods and habits. Setting goals also increases internal motivation, urging students to work harder to reach the targets they set for themselves.
As a result, goal setting boosts the effectiveness of any course, be it in an actual classroom or a website. However, engagement-boosting strategies, such as goal setting, are even more important when it comes to online learning, where captivating and interacting with students is more complex.
In this post, we’ll take a look at how goal setting can benefit online learning and how you can implement this concept to your LearnDash site. You can also work directly with one of our LMS experts to implement goal setting and other engagement boosting strategies on your elearning site.
Why is goal setting important in e-learning?
When students set goals, they are clarifying their purpose for taking the course and their outcome expectations. Essentially, setting goals prompts the student to identify what they want to get out of their learning journey. At the same time, it helps them figure out what they need to do and what milestones they have to reach in order to achieve these personal expectations.
Goals, especially those set by the students themselves, serve as internal motivation, which is one of the most powerful drivers of action. In e-learning, a lot of the process is self-paced, so students have to rely on themselves to achieve progress. Goal setting motivates them to take action and adopt a proactive attitude.
Defining Goals
It is important for students to set goals that are realistic, specific, and easy to measure. Some examples could be:
- Reading a certain number of pages in a book per day.
- Devoting a specific amount of time on a daily or weekly basis to studying course materials.
- Achieving a grade over 80% on all course quizzes.
- Completing a specific number of course assignments.
All of the examples listed above are the types of goals that our LMS experts recommend because they are realistic, achievable, and very specific. Your students will be able to easily monitor their progress and evaluate whether their goal has been achieved.
Check out this post to find out how goal setting benefits online learning and how to implement this concept to your #LearnDash site. Click To TweetImplementing Student Goal Setting To Your LearnDash Site
Students taking online courses can benefit from setting performance-related goals, rather than broad learning objectives since these are easily measurable and evaluated.
The LearnDash Goals add-on allows you to implement goal-setting into your online teaching model. This LearnDash add-on encourages students to set specific goals for their study habits. Students can select how much time, in minutes, they want to spend watching video lessons on their enrolled LearnDash courses per week.
The LearnDash Goals add-on also allows students to monitor their progress. Using shortcode, you can display a student’s weekly goal progress data on any page, including their LearnDash student profile page or lesson pages. Once your students achieve their study goal, they will see a congratulations message on this same screen.
Another way in which you can incorporate goal setting in your LearnDash course is by asking your students to set more subjective learning goals. For example, you can list learning objectives for your online courses to motivate your students to work towards acquiring a new skill or specific knowledge.
Goal Setting In Online Learning
Keeping your students motivated and engaged with online course materials can be challenging. Incorporating goal setting into your online course will help your students stay focused and accountable for their progress. You can integrate this concept into your site with the LearnDash Goals add-on.
If you have any questions about this add-on or would like to work with us to improve your LearnDash site, please contact our LMS experts.
