The emergence of eLearning platforms is one of the most significant trends in the education industry in the past couple of years. With the huge success of eLearning platforms like Udemy and Skillshare, it’s only fair that more institutions and businesses want to leverage this opportunity to build their own eLearning platform.
“The eLearning market reached $101 billion in 2019. The market is expected to grow exponentially,reaching over $370 billion by 2026.”
Covid-19 has especially fast-tracked the growth of eLearning as it has pushed schools, colleges, universities, and businesses to adopt a new innovative approach to education and teaching. As a result, the adoption of learning management systems (LMS) and online learning is becoming more prominent.
One of the most common ways to take this technology a step further is by integrating an in-app chat with eLearning platforms. The core idea here is to facilitate easier communication for students and drive better student engagement beyond the traditional video tutorials from their online coaches.
In this post, we’ll share the top in-app chat use cases for eLearning platforms that are helping businesses stand out from the competition and gain better results. Read on.
1. Personalized Online Tutoring
Each student has a different learning curve and might require a more personalized approach to online learning. Consequently, one of the biggest advantages of using in-app chat for eLearning is that teachers can address the specific requirements and needs of their students individually.
By offering a more personalized collaborative experience to learners, eLearning platforms can drive more engagement and customer retention.
If you integrate an in-app chat that comes with built-in machine learning and natural language processing algorithms, it can easily track and analyze the patterns of users’ learning styles and engagement.
For instance, in-app chat for eLearning platforms can help track learning progress, assign points, and guide students.
2. Virtual Classrooms for Real-time Communication
Instructors often expand their learning modules using several different types of learning material. With in-app chat for eLearning platforms, teachers can organize virtual classrooms for real-time communication apart from the regular video tutorials included in their course.
“eLearning increases learning retention rates by between 25% and 60%”.
Using top-tier infrastructure, you can allow users to host and participate in classrooms remotely, anywhere anytime. Moreover, they can record their classroom sessions and use them for future references or send them as downloadable to those learners who might want to access them later.
3. Webinars and Training Sessions
As more students enroll in courses, educators often want the ability to connect with their students directly and offer bonus learning content. This is where webinars and pre-recorded training sessions come in.
These types of content offer the very same benefits as real-time virtual classrooms do, such as the ability to reach a wider audience easily or deliver learning content conveniently. But they also offer plenty of other elements as they introduce a convenience factor that no other learning content can emulate in its entirety.
Students, training attendees, or event attendees can access webinars and training sessions anytime that is convenient for them. Similarly, webinar presenters and mentors can easily post webinars at a scheduled time they’re most comfortable with.
4. Interactive Group Chats
Think of group chats as group studies that learners often organize when doing face-to-face learning. The benefit of group chats is basically that learners can study collectively, and moreover, share insights, ask questions, and discuss doubts with each other.
With group chats, learners can exchange ideas and cooperate on various learning activities. This way, they will have an overall better learning experience.
Besides, it’s also easier for the tutor to collectively solve queries. Mentors can host live Q&A sessions which can be organized in group chats for a particular set of students.
So, when you think of rolling out your eLearning application, consider integrating an in-app chat feature in your tech stack that allows for learner interaction.
5. Feedback & Reviews
Collecting feedback and reviews from students is one of the best ways to ensure satisfaction as well as gather points of difficulty. Now, customers tend to steer clear from long, boring surveys that are filled with questions.
“A survey should be easy and quick to fill out. In fact, about 75% of customers are only willing to answer surveys with a maximum of five questions.”
This is especially useful in corporate eLearning where employees have to undergo frequent training. It could be sales training, recruitment training, workshops, product training, conferences, and workshops, etc.
With in-app chat in your eLearning platform, you can collect the responses as a part of a natural chat and expedite them to identify issues or work on new, better features.
6. File and Screen Sharing
With online education, there’s no need to worry about submitting assignments physically or reading printed textbooks. By using screen sharing, students can be more engaged and attentive towards their teacher.
With file sharing, teachers can share images, multimedia content, or any other useful files directly on chat. In addition, teachers can also share course material, performance analysis, reports, and more within the chat platform.
It’s also a great way to create unlimited polls, share assignments, and surveys during or after every online class to test the knowledge and skills of the students.
7. Collaborative Whiteboards
It’s no surprise that today digital collaborative whiteboards are increasingly replacing traditional whiteboards and thus offering enhanced learning experiences to students.
The functionality of a collaborative whiteboard makes for a more effective tool for presentations, training, brainstorming, meetings, and exchanging ideas compared to traditional whiteboards.
With collaborative whiteboards, teachers can quickly explain challenging topics and subjects by drawing shapes, figures, graphs, diagrams, and many other graphics at the click of a button.
Takeaway
In-app chats can be a game-changer for eLearning platforms. With the ability to connect students and teachers using a real-time communication app, you can increase virtual collaboration, mirror life-like teaching experiences, and do much more to deliver seamless online learning experiences.
If you're convinced with in-app chat, you must be wondering how to build it. You don't need to. Using chat APIs & SDKs from CometChat, you can add real-time text, voice, and video chat to your app in a less than a day.
If you want to know how to integrate an in-app chat your eLearning platforms, you can talk to our team and explore the possibilities. Or simply start exploring our APIs by Signing up to our developer dashboard [it’s free].
Aarushi Singh
CometChat
