Last month I wrote about the end of a course: whether members who finish can actually prove it. This month is about the middle, which is where most of them stop.
Every learning management system I’ve worked on records exactly where that happens. Which lesson a member reached, and which one they never opened. Which quiz they took three times and then abandoned. How long they spent before they closed the tab. It’s all sitting there, and in most associations nobody has looked at it.
October is a good month to look. Education committees are planning next year’s programme, and budgets are being set alongside them. Before anyone commissions a new course, it’s worth knowing what happened to the old ones.
The number you should stop reporting
Most education reports I see lead with enrolments. “Our wound care course had 640 enrolments this year.”
Enrolments measure your marketing. They tell you people clicked a button. They don’t tell you whether anyone learned anything, and a course with high enrolments and poor completion is a course that disappointed several hundred members at once.
Completion rate on its own isn’t much better. “42% completion” sounds like a fact, but it hides the thing you need to know, which is where the other 58% went.
What’s actually useful, per course, is four numbers:
- Completion rate. The share of people who started and finished.
- Where people stop. The lesson or quiz where the biggest single drop happens.
- Time to complete. How long finishers actually took, compared with what you advertise.
- Return rate. Of the people who left part-way, how many came back.
The second one is the one that changes decisions. The other three give it context.
Where to find it
If you’re on LearnDash, as many WordPress-based associations are, there are two places to look. The built-in course data export shows each learner’s progress and which lesson they’re currently on. LearnDash’s ProPanel reporting add-on goes further, with course progress rates, quiz completion rates and time spent on each course. Quiz statistics, question by question, can be exported from the quiz settings.
Other platforms name these things differently, but almost all of them have a course progress report and quiz results somewhere in the admin area. Your web analytics will also show you views for each lesson page, which gives you a rough drop-off curve even if the LMS reports are poor.
And if nobody on your team can find any of this, that’s a finding too. It usually means the reporting was never switched on, or it’s switched on and nobody was ever shown where it lives. Both are quick to fix.
Five patterns that turn up again and again
When I open an association’s course data for the first time, the same shapes tend to appear. Here are the five I see most, what’s usually behind them, and what to do.
1. The cliff at lesson one
A large share of people start the course and never get past the first lesson.
This is almost always the welcome. A twelve-minute introductory video. A page of learning objectives, housekeeping and accreditation wording. A “before you begin” document to download. A busy clinician who has set aside twenty minutes spends them on preamble and leaves without having learned anything.
The fix: get to real content within the first two minutes. Move the housekeeping to a sidebar or the end. If the introductory video matters, make it the second thing, not the first.
2. The quiz wall
Progress is fine until a particular quiz, and then it stops dead.
Look at the question-level statistics. Nine times out of ten, one or two questions are being failed by almost everyone. The wording is ambiguous, or two answers are defensible, or the question tests a detail the lesson never actually covered. Sometimes the pass mark is 100% and there’s no retake, so one slip ends the course.
The fix: rewrite the question, not the course. If a question is failed by most people who otherwise do well, the question is the problem. Allow retakes unless there’s a regulatory reason not to, and say in plain words what the pass mark is before the quiz starts.
3. The login in the middle
People drop off at a point that has nothing to do with the content. It might be half-way through a lesson, or at the start of a new session.
Usually this is the join between your membership system and your LMS. A session times out and the member is sent back to a login page they don’t recognise. They start on a work computer and try to carry on at home, and their progress isn’t where they left it. Or the password reset email goes to spam. I wrote about this join when looking at what to look for in an LMS. Retrofitting it is rarely cheap, but finding it is.
The fix: go through the course yourself as a member, on two devices, over two days. You’ll find it.
4. The module that doesn’t work on a phone
One lesson has a noticeably higher drop-off than those either side of it, and your analytics show most learners are on mobile.
Look at what’s in that lesson. An embedded PDF that needs pinching and zooming. A wide table. A drag-and-drop exercise built for a mouse. A video with the key information burnt into tiny on-screen text. Everything around it works on a phone; that one lesson doesn’t.
The fix: turn the PDF into a web page, make the table readable on a narrow screen, and swap the interaction for something that works with a thumb. These are small jobs.
5. The course that’s secretly two courses
There’s a sharp drop exactly half-way, where the subject changes.
This happens when a course grows. It started as “Assessment”, someone added “Management”, and now it’s a four-hour course that half your members only wanted the first part of. They take what they need and leave, and your completion rate records them as a failure.
The fix: split it. Two shorter courses, each with its own certificate, each counting properly towards CPD. Members get credit for what they did, and your figures stop telling you something false.
Not all drop-off is a problem
Some members will always stop part-way, and that’s fine. Someone who needed the section on dressing selection, read it, and went back to work has been well served, even if your report counts them as not finishing.
The shape tells you which kind you’re looking at. A gentle slope, where a few people leave at every stage, is normal. A cliff, where many people leave at one particular point, is telling you something about that point. Fix the cliffs; leave the slopes alone.
None of this needs a new platform
It’s tempting to read the five patterns above and conclude your LMS is the problem. It rarely is.
Every fix on that list is a content change, a settings change or a small piece of development: a rewritten quiz question, a reordered lesson, a PDF turned into a page, a course split in two. That’s weeks of work, not a replacement project, and it doesn’t put your historical completion records at risk.
There are real reasons to move platform: no ongoing development, no way to get your data out, no way to extend it at all. “Members don’t finish our courses” is almost never one of them. Most systems don’t need replacing; they need someone to look after them properly.
What to take to your education committee
Instead of an enrolment figure, take one line per course:
Course name · completion rate · biggest drop-off point · median time to complete vs advertised · the one change we’ll make
That last column is what turns a report into a plan. A committee that sees “biggest drop-off: Quiz 2, question 4, failed by most people” will approve fixing it in a minute. A committee that sees “42% completion” will start a conversation about a new platform.
It also gives you something far more useful to put in front of your board when they ask what the education programme achieved.
A ten-minute check for this week
Pick your most-enrolled course. Open the progress report. Find the single lesson or quiz where the largest number of people stopped.
Then open that lesson, on your phone, and try to get through it as a member would.
That’s usually enough to find the first fix.
If you’d like a second pair of eyes on your LMS and the member area around it, our Website Check-Up is £400. It covers technical condition, accessibility and compliance, usability, sustainability, and what AI assistants currently say about your organisation. You’ll have a plain-English report within 48 hours of giving us access, usually within 24, and if you go on to work with us the £400 is deducted from that work.
If you already know what needs fixing and need someone to do it, that’s what our Website Care Plan is for. It starts from £400 a month, there’s no minimum contract, and unused hours roll over for up to twelve months, so you can save them towards a piece of course work like this.
Or book a call and tell me which course everyone gives up on. No charge, no pitch.
