4 Ways to Use Optional Lessons to Build a More Flexible Learning Experience

Skilljar recently released optional lessons, which are lessons that appear in courses, but aren’t required to complete a course. Any lesson type (e.g. text, Live Training, SCORM) can be set as optional. This gives you the ability to add supplementary content like surveys and reference material, while providing learners the flexibility to choose which lessons they want to view. And since your course completion rate will only calculate the completion of required lessons, you can more accurately see the completion rate of the lessons you want your learners to take.

Here are a few ways to use optional lessons to improve your training program!

Ask for feedback through optional surveys

Getting feedback from learners will help you improve your training programs, and the best time to ask learners to take a survey is immediately after they finish a course. 

Add a survey to the end of a course as an optional lesson, and your learners can decide if they want to take it without it impacting their course completion.

Provide flexibility with assessments in your courses

Some learners may come with pre-existing knowledge of a subject and may not want to take all the lessons in a course. You can now add optional lessons in a course, but allow students to take an assessment to get credit for completing the course. This allows you to validate your learner’s understanding of the content, while also allowing your learners the flexibility to skip the material they already know and test out of the course.

Give learners the option to check their knowledge

Knowledge checks are a great way to help learners validate their understanding of the course material. However, some learners prefer to only watch and learn the course material. When scores and assessments aren’t an essential part of your training strategy, you can add optional quizzes or SCORM content throughout your course. This way, learners have the option to choose how and when they want to check their knowledge.

Add supplemental material for your learners to reference

Your learners may want additional materials to help them understand the subject. You can now add supplemental content (including embedded videos and files) to your courses so that learners can choose to engage with them if they need additional help, but not require them to view it to complete the course. This is also a great way to provide reference material for your live training that attendees can review later.

These are just a few examples of how you can use optional lessons to build a more flexible and robust training program. The Skilljar training platform is built to provide flexibility in course content, so your learners can have the best possible experience. Have another use case for optional lessons? Let us know in the comments.