The Benefits of Learner Onboarding with Online Enrolments
Long and complex online enrolment forms can discourage learners, often leading to incomplete submissions and lost business. Learner Onboarding provides an opportunity to capture applicants with a "light touch" enrolment form, before obtaining the bulk of the details at a later point.
An example of this enrolment journey for a learner could be:- Applicant finds a course that they are interested in on your website
- Applicant fills in a simple Online Enrolment Form that only requests minimal information (such as Given Name, Surname, Date of Birth, Email Address, Phone Number & optional custom fields that check course prerequisites)
- Applicant completes the Online Enrolment Form by paying the course fee
- Booking Confirmation, Receipt and Student Portal Login Invite are automatically emailed to enrollee
- Enrollee logs into Learner Portal, where they must complete a Learner Onboarding form in order to access their course materials
- Emergency Contact Information
- Postal & Street Addresses
- Citizenship/Nationality fields
- Prior Schooling/Study fields
- USI
- Reason for Studying current course
- Eligibility info for state funding
- Document uploads
- Further custom fields
The student will be incentivised and motivated to provide this information, as by the time the fields are presented they have already signed up and potentially paid for the course.
What we recommend changing
If you wish to change your existing Online Enrolment Forms to fit the “light touch” process described above, we recommend removing a number of fields and/or steps from your current Online Enrolment Forms, and instead add these to relevant Learner Onboarding forms.
Warning: Learner Onboarding forms necessarily require applicants to log in to the aXcelerate Learner Portal in order to access and complete Learner Onboarding forms. Please consider if and how you are setting up student users, manually or automatically, before attempting to implement Learner Onboarding or modifying your Online Enrolment Forms.
A typical Online Enrolment Form could look like:
- First Name
- Last Name
- Mobile
- Date of Birth
- Any Custom Fields that check course prerequisites
In addition to stripping down your Online Enrolment Forms, you will also need to build and apply Learner Onboarding forms.
- Create a new Learner Onboarding Form, ensuring it has steps/fields to capture any required information that is no longer present in your Online Enrolment Forms
- Link your Learner Onboarding Form to relevant Qualifications
- Test the behaviour of the applied Learner Onboarding Forms by enrolling a dummy student Contact, impersonating them, and then completing the Learner Onboarding Form
Making the changes
To remove steps/fields from your existing enrolment form, you will need access to your WordPress website. Please speak with your Web Developers if you do not have an existing login to your site.
Before making any changes, we recommend you ‘back up’ the form you wish to alter.
To backup an existing form:- Once logged into your WordPress site, select the aXcelerate Integration Plugin found on the left-hand side of the WordPress dashboard
- Select Enroller
- Select the plus icon on the form you are going to alter (this will duplicate the form)
- Select edit on the duplicated form
- Select Save Config
- Select Save Changes (found in the top right corner)
Tip: We recommend renaming the duplicated form and adding ‘Back up’ at the end under the form settings.
- Once logged into your WordPress site, select the aXcelerate Integration Plugin found on the left-hand side of the WordPress dashboard
- Select Enroller
- Select the pencil icon on the Enrolment Form you wish to edit
- You will see a list of steps. Select the cross icon on any steps you wish to remove
- Select Save Config
- Select Save Changes (found in the top right corner)
Warning: Please ensure you only remove these step types: contact-update, enrol-details & portfolio. Ensure to keep the Login, Review Details and Billing Step within the forms as these are required for enrolments into aXcelerate.
- Once logged into your WordPress site, select the aXcelerate Integration Plugin found on the left-hand side of the WordPress dashboard
- Select Enroller
- Select the pencil icon on the Enrolment Form you wish to edit
- You will see a list of fields that are included in the step. Select the cross icon to remove the field.
- Select Save Step
- Select Save Config
- Select Save Changes (found in the top right corner)