There are two different ways students can take your course: via self-paced learning or via drip-feed learning . With self-paced learning, when your students purchase the course, they instantly get access to the whole curriculum. Some of the drawbacks of this are that they can binge watch it and the knowledge will not really ‘digest,’ they can skip to the most interesting parts, or in the worst case scenario – download the content and ask for a refund.
To help combat this obvious drawback to e-learning, learning management systems and online course creation tools have started to implement drip-feeding. This feature allows you to schedule your lessons at a specific time and date, just like in a real-time classroom environment.
Apart from solving the problem listed above, here are some other benefits of drip-feeding:
- It helps learners digest content better and increases the success rate as they will have just enough information to think through before the next piece of content is released to them;
- It creates a sense of suspense, and makes your student look forward to the next lesson, like TV’s weekly episode mode before Netflix existed;
- You can add students to an email campaign to notify when new content is released, and then use this same email to promote other courses, which builds your brand;
- Drip-feeding works really well for extensive courses with a lot of content, and spreading a course over months can help build word of mouth and increase sales and brand awareness.
Despite there being some clear benefits of drip-feeding, we believe it is case-by-case, and so we strongly recommend you experiment with both types of learning and see which works better specifically for your business.
