How to Avoid eLearning Burnout and Fatigue

Remote training has become part of our daily lives and routines, proving invaluable to businesses with remote employees. But as more and more materials transition to online learning courses, it’s essential to consider how to prevent burnout to keep your employees engaged. Too many course videos in a condensed amount of time can result in online fatigue.

What Is Online Learning Fatigue?

Those who feel extremely tired of using technology may be experiencing online learning burnout. Those who feel this way may have an underlying sense of exhaustion, stress, or even anxiety surrounding the constant need to be online for learning sessions, meetings, and calls. This feeling of burnout can pose a direct threat to employee learning and professional development.

Why Does eLearning Cause Burnout, Fatigue, and Stress?

Online classes stress learners out in a different way. As employees reportedly spend over 50% more time using video calls than they did before the pandemic, they are using more screen time than ever before. This can lead to burnout for a few reasons:

• There is a greater need to be “on” when it comes to online workshops and meetings. Employees may spend extra time looking professional and engaged to prove that they are present and paying attention.
• Avoiding burnout is even more complicated with the temptation to multitask that’s constantly present with online learning.
• Many people share their in-home workspaces with their families — spouses, kids, pets, and more. This can further strain their ability to concentrate.

How Does Remote Training Learning Fatigue Affect Your Employees?

Make sure your business is doing everything that it can to prevent corporate eLearning burnout, as it can lead to employee turnover. A recent survey notes that 69% of employees working from home are experiencing burnout. Even your most consistent, motivated employees may feel sick of spending so much time online.

Your students may be unable to absorb the material as they spend all day online. It could lead to a situation where your employees or students refuse to look at a screen altogether. The last thing you want is to use your company’s time and resources to put together online training courses while your employees are counting down the minutes until the course is over.

How to Prevent and Fight eLearning Fatigue and Burnout

It’s completely possible to overcome stress in eLearning as long as you have the right tools and approach. Here are some examples of how to combat online learning and learner fatigue.

Break Online Training Into Bite-Size Doses

Overloading your employees with too much information can cause learning burnout and diminish the value of your training program altogether. Your learners will be tempted to click on different items and miss out on important information.

Keep presentations short, think 5 minutes, to convey the most important information to your employees. You can follow shorter sessions with a quick assessment that forces students to seek the correct information.

Incorporate Frequent Breaks

The longer your online training course needs to be, the more breaks you should give to your employees to regroup. Giving them an opportunity to hit pause and step away from the screen helps give them more energy while allowing them to soak in the information they just watched or heard. During their breaks, employees can stretch, walk around, use the restroom, grab some water and come back ready to learn more.

Build Engaging Content

A simple way to avoid learning fatigue is by ensuring the content is engaging enough to keep employees interested. The information shouldn’t only initially grab their attention but hold their attention throughout the course.

Consider your learning mediums. Are you using text-heavy slides with minimal visual elements? As different learners gravitate toward various learning styles, make sure to try interactive quizzes, dynamic graphics, videos, voiceovers, storytelling techniques, and more. The more interactive your content creation process, the better.

Keep It Flexible

The option for self-pacing is a great way to help your employees and learners overcome stress in eLearning. As remote training software gives employees the opportunity to press pause and complete the training on their own schedules, this can help alleviate a significant amount of stress. Make sure you give your employees a choice in how and when they complete their training, so they don’t see it as an additional burden in their day.

Use Gamification

A little bit of healthy competition can help keep employees motivated and energized. Using gamification tactics such as leaderboards, badges, and other challenges can keep learners engaged and wanting to interact with your content. This healthy competition can give your audience more energy and motivation to get through each course.

Build a Sense of Community

Remote employees may feel a sense of isolation because they don’t see other people face-to-face. By adding opportunities for connection into your training, you can facilitate a sense of community in your business.

Real-time training sessions are an ideal way to break up longer courses and help your remote team feel less alone. They can discuss the material, answer each other's questions, and show one another that they are not alone.

Integrate Training Into the Work Schedule

Improve the learning experience for your employees by building in education throughout their workday. Your team may feel as though tasks surrounding training are only additional items on their to-do list.

Show them that you value their time by incorporating learning time into their schedules to complete throughout the day. This allows them to reduce stress and have downtime in their already busy schedules.

Avoid eLearning Burnout with Allegro Media Design

Our experts at Allegro Media Design are happy to help build custom eLearning courses to keep your audience engaged. If you’re interested in working with us or learning more about our process, be sure to contact us directly!