How can Learning Enterprises Prevent Student Churn?

How can Learning Enterprises Prevent Student Churn?

Two little mice fell in a bucket of cream. The first mouse quickly gave up and drowned. The second mouse wouldn't quit. He struggled so hard that eventually he churned that cream into butter and crawled out. Gentlemen, as of this moment, I am that second mouse. - Frank Abagnale Sr. - Catch me if you Can

According to this article, there are many ‘beautiful’ sounding words in the English language such as melancholy, aurora and loquacious (meaning talkative, or chatty), but there are also unpleasant sounding words like churn.

It’s a jarring word that doesn’t roll off your tongue. Even the concept of churn sounds laborious. And for CEOs, CFOs, COOs, and Academic Department Heads the word certainly creates hard-work.

Student churn is when students drop out of your learning center. Whether students stop learning mid-course, or disappear right before the end, it makes the chance of re-enrollment pretty slim.

Seeing class sizes shrink a little at the edges may not seem like a problem, but it is.

In fact, decreasing student churn and increasing student retention rates are two of the biggest challenges facing learning enterprises.

For a simple reason:

The cost of acquiring a new student is far more expensive than retaining one.

Regardless of the monthly or yearly tuition fee, if a student decides to drop out, the cost of acquiring new students will increase in the long run to cover the hidden expenses of that dropout. (questionpro.com/blog/student-churn/)

Learning centers face an uphill struggle to keep student churn rates down and retention rates up. Keep reading to learn how your learning enterprise can be the second mouse and prevent student churn.

Promote lifelong learning

Language learning is a lifelong process - Ray Clifford

Enterprises spend a lot of time and money promoting the value of their course to get students through the door. To prevent student churn, it’s imperative for enrichment centers to instill the idea of continuous growth and improvement among learners. If students and parents understand how each course fits into a wider learning journey, they are more likely to re-enroll when one course ends.

You can promote a lifelong learning mindset by making sure all your courses and content have clear and attainable learning objectives. These objectives will help demonstrate how each lesson builds upon the previous one and shows how each class is one tiny piece in a giant puzzle. Use a Content Management System (CMS) to organize all your courses and classes in an intuitive user-friendly fashion. Using a CMS, learners can view their course progress and access all the learning objectives and goals at the click of a button.

By promoting lifelong learning students and parents will be more willing to buy into the idea of continual study, rather than making one-off payments for courses.

Promoting active engagement

“It’s not about competing to win, but sharing how you won.” Daniel Debow - Salesforce

Teenagers will try to get out doing anything: showering, cleaning their bedroom, and going to extracurricular classes. If the tutor center classes are boring, it’s highly likely they’ll plead with their parents to look for alternatives.

Preventing boredom is a sure-fire way to prevent student churn.

The hardest part of running an enrichment center is creating dynamic and interactive learning experiences that keep students motivated and committed to their learning journey. By using a Virtual Learning Environment (VLE), educators can incorporate tons of interactive content such as snapchat-style multimedia, real time messaging, discussion boards, and even AR and VR experiences.

Keeping an eye on attendance

It’s in everyone’s best interest to keep attendance rates up. A student missing one class is a slippery slope that leads to poor attendance rates.

To stop absences going under the radar, teachers and administrative staff can check attendance among other useful analytics on the student's LMS dashboard. Innovative systems can even create separate parent profiles, usually at no extra cost, so parents can keep a watchful eye on their child's progress.

Ensuring learners don't get left behind is partly your establishments responsibility. However, some student absences are inevitable. Fortunately your LMS gives students the chance to catch up on missed lessons. Students that were absent from a specific class can access the learning material and sometimes live class recordings from home. Self-study options give students a flexible way to combat schedule disruptions.

Evaluating proactively

Typically students are given a course evaluation at the end of a course. Unfortunately, if students weren’t satisfied with the course this knowledge is of little use to you now. The chance for re-enrollment is probably out the window.

Your learning center should evaluate proactively before the end of the course. Feedback should be two-way. When educators give feedback to students, they should create the chance for student’s to reciprocate.

You can automate feedback using your LMS. Teachers and admin can distribute surveys and questionnaires across all learning levels. Having all these valuable insights on one screen can help administrators scan the data and identify patterns, concerns, or suggestions that can improve learning operations.

By proactively evaluating the learning experiences you offer, you can deal with issues before they affect that churn rate.

Next Steps

Harvard Business School says increasing retention rate by 5% can increase profits by 25% to 95%!

So it’s vital that your learning enterprise prioritizes keeping students rather than catching them and letting them go.

To effectively implement the strategies above and prevent student churn, you’ll need the latest CMS and LMS technology. You can find it from OOOLAB.

Our group of expert edTech developers have created LearningOS, a sophisticated LMS system helping learning organizations to systematically increase revenue.