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The Limitless Benefits of a Fantastic CE Learner Experience

user experience

Learner satisfaction has a profound impact on your institution. Any time your learners have trouble browsing, selecting, and accessing continuing education (CE) activities, their problems become your problems. On the other hand, when their CE experience is overwhelmingly straightforward and insightful, their gratification becomes your gratification.

Using the right technologies, you can optimize learner satisfaction and institutional effectiveness in dramatic ways. Let’s take a closer look at a few of them.

Increase learner participation

Many continuing education providers lament the fact that learners:

Technology can eliminate these problems. By automating everything from activity search and selection, registration and to transcript and certificate access, you can make CE more enjoyable for your learners and enjoy increased participation as a result.

At Rievent, we see technology’s impact on learner participation every day. When PLICO, a liability insurance carrier that provides CME to insureds, started automating its post-event evaluation process, participation soared among attending learners. Compared to previous events (and previous, paper-based processes) 100% of PLICO’s learners completed an evaluation.

Increased participation is giving PLICO more useful feedback on the quality and efficacy of its programs. The lesson? When a task is easy for your learners to complete, more of them will complete it.

Broaden the appeal of your activities

Another aspect of the CE learner experience relates to activity types and the extent to which the available activities engage and provide value to participants. Increasingly, CE providers are experimenting with new activity types in an attempt to up the ante on the learner experience and broaden the “big picture” appeal of their CE programs.

Take Stanford Medicine, whose new video-based CME activities are designed to both entertain learners and have a greater impact on patient outcomes. By embracing new technologies rather than shrugging them off, Stanford is actively attempting to increase learner engagement.

And when existing learners are more engaged by their experience, you create new opportunities to expand your CE programs.

Writing last year for the Journal of the American Medical Association on behalf of the Accreditation Council for Continuing Medical Education (ACCME), Dr. Graham T. McMahon remarked:

Some learning is best achieved through problem-solving, case studies, and small group discussions as part of live activities in which physicians learn from each other. Some learning goals are best achieved through online delivery, through self-assessment activities, or the facilitation of discussion through webinars and other formats. Most learners need a combination of educational opportunities to stay current with best practices.

For providers who strive to deliver that “combination of educational opportunities,” there’s limitless potential to diversify. From new activity content to newer, more relevant delivery formats, improving the learner experience can improve the growth trajectory of your organization.

Enhance existing CE activities

What would you do with your time if you didn’t have to:

You’d probably spend more time developing valuable CE activities that meet your learners’ needs. And that’s exactly what you’ll have time for when you embrace technologies that empower your learners!

Spend lots of time fielding requests for documentation? Make it easy for learners to access those materials. Manually registering learners and processing attendance? Let your learners register and request credit themselves. A CE-focused learning management system (LMS) can make it possible.

All of these changes do more than just improve the CE experience for your learners – they give you extra hours to focus on valuable tasks. Many providers using the Rievent Platform devote that extra time to enhancing existing CE activities and creating valuable new ones.

You’ll probably do the exact same thing.

Efficiency and user friendliness? That’s just the beginning.

When many CE providers think about migrating to a new LMS, they think about two things:

  1. Operational efficiency gains
  2. User-friendly features for staff and learners

They’ll get both of those benefits, but the advantages of an LMS that’s built for continuing education are extensive. Besides the immediate feature upgrades, you can make lasting improvements to every aspect of what you do, from learner participation and content relevance to expanding your footprint in the marketplace.

In other words, features and functionality are only the beginning. By optimizing the entire CE experience, the right LMS can help you provide more relevant, impactful education to your current and future learners.