8 strategies to reduce distractions and improve learning retention among learners

Kiran

Hey Moodlers

Home is where the heart is! Yes, sure but home is also where all the distraction is! 

And distractions can affect the pace of online learning!  

Capturing student attention in your Moodle e-Learning site is a hard nut to crack. Moreover, encouraging them to continue or actively participate is both stressful and challenging. 

When confusion or boredom in your online learning Moodle course creeps in, your students are bound to become less productive and drop out eventually.

Here’s when building a high-focus, distraction-free learning experience in Moodle becomes a priority. 

How does a distraction-free e-learning environment help?

• Creates a dedicated high-focus study zone in your Moodle e-learning site
• Keeps the primary course content in focus
• Simplifies the course journey and motivates course completion
• Fosters active engagement of learners in the course content and relevant activities
• Provides a clean user interface to work and interact with
• Improves navigation and the overall user experience as a result

Now that we have seen the benefits of a high-focus online learning environment, let’s see how we can create one.

How to create a distraction-free learning environment in Moodle?

If you’re battling falling student engagement levels on your Moodle learning platform. Now is the time to put into action the top 9 strategies for effective online learning. These tips will go a long way in helping you build an effective e-learning Moodle course for your students, free of distractions.

#1 Fostering micro-learning and efficient reporting

To prevent your Moodle e-learning course from falling out of favour with your students, it is recommended to take the microlearning approach. Students have a lot of information to absorb. It is best not to bombard your learners with too much course content at a time. Students drowning in information are more likely to get confused and drop out. 

Microlearning does the trick here! In order to promote smart study, it is advisable to give out bite-sized chunks of information to your students to prevent the risk of information overload. You could give out only the most relevant and necessary information that is crisp and easy to understand. This helps students to learn at their own pace without cramming the whole course material. Combined with mobile responsive design, microlearning can be an absolute boon for your students eliminating device barriers, if any.

Another time-tested tip – Distraction can also be controlled by staying updated with key metrics indicating student activity and engagement levels. Reporting plugins in Moodle can really add an informed perspective to this and promote learner satisfaction.

#2 Promoting interactive learning

Any concept explained can simply end up as a fuzzy blur in their brains. However, interactive learning can drastically improve attention and knowledge retention among learners. 

Remember! You have put in tons of work to create your course content. So, make every effort count and try to provide as much value as you can.  

Moodle has a whole lot of ways to smarten up your online course to promote interactive learning. You can gamify the learning process and also include a wide range of interactive activities such as quizzes, polls, memory games, flashcards etc. 

To fine-tune things a bit more, you can even implement gamified learning, video-based learning, animations, or scenario-based simulations with HTML5, Adobe Captivate, Adobe Presenter etc. – a fail-safe technique that works to tackle short attention spans and beat distractions

Encourage students to ask questions by leveraging the Moodle Forums. Being a constant passive recipient of the course can be boring. Regular feedback and exchange of course-relevant thoughts can be a catalyst for dialogue, that can help with better information recall.

#3 Improving Navigation 

Another key aspect of having a learner-friendly Moodle course is an easy navigation system. 

We all know that Moodle doesn’t stack up well from a user experience perspective.

Your Moodle course has all the information your learners need, but it would be pointless if they experience frequent friction to access the required resources in a limited number of clicks. Unnecessary navigation elements can interrupt the learning process leading to immense frustration. So, we suggest keeping your interface simple with minimal navigation elements.

Bad navigation can alienate a huge chunk of your learners – fix it ASAP – This can be a great beginner’s guide to simplifying Moodle navigation for you.

#4 Decluttering layout 

A great clutter-free layout with a pleasing design never disappoints. So, it is recommended to keep your primary learning screen-space in Moodle absolutely clean. A UI that is high on functionality as well as visually appealing can prove instrumental in arresting distractions. 

#5. Reducing Page Load Time

Another actionable that should be given a serious thought is slow site loading time. Regardless of how nice or attractive your Moodle e-learning site looks, your students are likely to exit your Moodle course since it’s annoying to keep waiting indefinitely for a site that takes forever to load. 

Your students are going to abandon the course if it takes anything more than 3 seconds to render the content. Moreover, slow load times can take your students wandering elsewhere – Distraction spotted! So, it is recommended to optimize your Moodle site speed for the best possible performance.

Put yourself in your learners’ shoes and imagine being stuck on a website that refuses to load! Frustrating, isn’t it? A slow loading Moodle site is a huge source of distraction that affects student engagement and should be addressed with a quick page speed test. Check out this article to know more on how to optimize and speed up your Moodle site.

#6 Sticking to a proper schedule 

Being organized is crucial to complete learning goals, and it is even more important when taking an e-learning course. Something as straightforward as a course progress bar in your Moodle theme can help students voluntarily make their eLearning course study a priority. They can easily create a study plan to execute by reserving specific time slots for their course work. 

As a teacher, you might want to plan your course activities to move closer to your teaching targets. Here’s where scheduling helps. Scheduling can also help with reducing distractions as your students have well-planned activities to look forward to. Learn how to add an event in Moodle.

Further, a course progress bar throws light on the learning targets upfront so that students know what’s expected of them – Gives them a solid reason to stay on your Moodle LMS and a good way to keep them laser-focused and disciplined throughout the entire learning process. 

#7 Presentation of e-Learning content

A useful tip is to ensure that the course content is not scattered and has a proper structure. Your courses and the related study material must be easily discoverable and accessible. This eliminates frustration and prevents students from being distracted too. Here are some tips to ease content development in Moodle.

Course Formats can really help in refining how your courses are presented. Therefore, it is a good idea to invest in premium Moodle course formats to change the look of your courses and make them more presentable, easy to consume. Revamping the layout of the course could be one of the effective tactics to reduce distractions and engage students in a better way. Edwiser Course Formats plugin allows you to experiment with 6 different course formats. Moreover, it is fully compatible with our theme, Edwiser RemUI. 

#8 Timely assessments

Last but not least, some of the best ways to reduce distraction is to keep students motivated towards performing well through consistent assessments. This is one of the most effective ways to connect with your students by making them realize that they are preparing towards their learning objectives. Moodle has several powerful assessment alternatives such as Quizzes, Workshops, Lessons, Assignments etc. It gives you options to conduct peer assessments and even provide generic or private feedback. 

In case you’re curious, here’s a quick read on how to create play-once audio quizzes in Moodle.

Having regular assessments is a powerful way to achieve desirable learning outcomes, assure course completion and reduce distractions. 

Milestones achieved can be celebrated to take them closer to their learning goal. It also determines the degree of success of your course and most importantly, keeps distraction at bay. Here’s a handy guide to efficient grading of a quiz in Moodle. 

Conclusion

So, these were some strategies for creating a crisp, distraction-free learning experience for your students on your Moodle LMS. Edwiser RemUI’s focus mode is specially designed keeping a few of the above tactics in mind. It aims to fix on-screen distractions and help you achieve a  foolproof high-focus e-learning zone. 

Here’s a list of actionables that can be easily performed with the help of Edwiser RemUI’s FOCUS MODE:

• Improving Moodle navigation
• Decluttering the layout
• Sticking to a proper schedule for timely course completion

Be sure to check out this feature and implement it on your Moodle LMS. 

Let’s together make Moodle a better place for online learning 🙂

Also, how do you like the article? Feel free to drop us a comment in the comments section below.