Getting learners to complete eLearning is only half thebattle; what really counts is whether they retain the learning and apply it intheir work.
Instructional designers and developers pour heart and soulinto creating engaging eLearning, figuring out ways to funnel learners throughthe courses, measure participation, and assess learning on completion. Even so,depressing statistics tell them that, a week later, learners won’t remembermost of the material. Three months down the line? Forget it.
It doesn’t have to be that way.
Enter the coach
Bringing in a coach to follow up with learners and gentlyprod them to apply learning, set and work toward goals, and recall content theylearned can improve the “stickiness” of material, whether it’s facts,processes, or “soft skills,” like communication with direct reports or engagingwith customers.
Sound expensive? Think again: The coach does not have to bea real person. That’s where Mobile Coachcan help. The company’s innovative chatbot-based solution supports and reinforceseLearning to help it stick.
Before founding Mobile Coach, CEO Vince Han worked on usingtechnology to try to drive behavior change around health and fitness activities.He saw that the popular apps tended to get the most use by people who would beactive anyhow; the thornier problem was motivating the less-active people todevelop better health habits.
“We were really trying to figure out how [we could] applytechnology to help someone be more successful in achieving some sort ofpersonal development goal, whether that was keeping a New Year’s resolution,which is very apropos for this time of year, or whether it was going to somecorporate-sponsored workshop and learning a skill,” Han said. He heard the sametypes of feedback around both issues—people had a hard time sticking to theirgoals or following through on the changes they wanted to make based on thetraining.
How does a chatbot work?
Han wondered how to better engage learners’ attention. “Aswe looked into that, we discovered that the prerequisite to being successful ineither use case is maintaining a level of mindfulness,” he said. The trickwould be to have help—coaching—that would capture and hold people’s interest.
He came up with the idea of a chatbot when, musing about whatwould get the attention of, say, a new manager who just finished training, hethought: A text message from the manager’s best friend. “We worked backwardfrom that,” Han said.
Han is careful to emphasize that Mobile Coach never tries totrick anyone or pretend that the coach is a real person; instead, the goal isto make the chatbot’s content valuable and relevant enough that the learnerwill pay attention.
“Being effective, from a training reinforcement perspective,is designing that chatbot in a way where it can join the learner’s circle offriends and family for a period of time,” Han said. It’s not trying to be alearner’s best friend, but it shouldn’t sound like a spammy message that youmight get from your dentist’s office, either. He described the goal as a middleground, using as an example a text conversation he recently had with the hostof a vacation rental. It was highly relevant, so it held his attention, but theperson was someone he’d never meet, not a friend. The chatbot coach is tryingto enter that same role: The content, and therefore the conversation, isrelevant to learners because it can help them achieve their goals and get wherethey want to go.
Once the coach has the learner engaged in conversation, anotherkey to success is not overdoing it. For most customers, Han said, about twointeractions per week over two to three months is optimal (Figure 1). MobileCoach tracks data on all learner interactions and carefully watches whetherlearners are disengaging or “kicking out” the chatbot—and, if so, what thetrigger was.
Figure 1: Examples of Mobile Coach chatbot interactions
The coach is not intended to become a permanent fixture inlearners’ contacts. Most customers use the coach for a few months, but the “relationship”can last as little as four weeks or as long as a year.
Two use cases for chatbots
The formula is working: Mobile Coach’s tracking has foundthat “a well-designed chatbot will have the vast majority—maybe 75percent—answering multiple questions, enough questions so that we know thatthey are engaged.”
Customers’ goals for their learners tend to fall into two“buckets,” Han said:
- Skills development, where learners areencouraged to practice soft skills learned in training or eLearning and reporton their progress toward goals they have set for themselves
- Content transfer, where learners who completed,say, a compliance course might be quizzed on their recall or application ofspecific information
A custom conversation
Mobile Coach is an authoring tool; eLearning developers cancreate their own completely customized chatbot conversations. The idea is toreinforce existing eLearning or training, with coaching beginning the moment alearner completes the course.
“Let’s say I’m taking a course on my company’s LMS. Ideally,as soon as I hit ‘done’ or finish the assessment that signals the end of thecourse, a second later I should get a message from the chatbot,” Han said. Thecontinuity and customization should make the chatbot coach feel like anintegral part of the course.
The coaching mirrors the language and tone of the eLearningand builds on content and examples the learner has already covered. The coach isintended to be a natural extension of and support for the training, not a new educationalexperience. Mobile Coach will build the chatbot based on content provided by acustomer—or teach the customer’s eLearning developers to write the chatbotconversation themselves.
Use existing eLearning resources
Learning managers often tell Han that they have “all thesegreat resources on the LMS” that people don’t use—PDFs, videos, slides. Thecoach is “a great way to push and reinforce and repackage existing [eLearning]material,” Han said. It can ask questions, push out links to supplementalcontent, and help learners track goals. Every couple of weeks, a learner mightbe asked to report on progress toward a specific objective.
Mobile Coach encourages eLearning developers to give thecoach a recognizable personality and to include some fun elements—animatedGIFs, a high five, a joke—to make the interactions fun for learners. “Sometimesit does take a couple iterations of a chatbot script to get it just right,” Hansaid.
Mobile Coach integrates with a variety of communication channels.In North America, coaches usually interact with learners via text messaging,but in other areas, alternative platforms—such as Facebook Messenger, Line, andWeChat—are more popular.
Feedback from learners using the chatbots has been overwhelminglypositive, Han said; they appreciate the reminders. “Innately, people know that,in the training context, they’re used to forgetting things and not following up.They appreciate it when training is sticking and working for them.”
