Persuasive Technologies in m-Learning for Training Professionals: How to Keep Learners Engaged With Adaptive Triggering

Global corporations are characterized by a large number of employees and geographically dispersed offices. Moreover, the competitiveness in the global market requires them to invest in their human resources to be able to remain a step ahead of competition. Implementing large scale classical education in such environments is challenging and costly. Mobile e-learning (m-learning) allows users to tailor their professional training and education to their needs and time constraints. However, in self-paced education, it is very hard to keep user retention and engagement. To achieve the latter, we have designed and developed an m-learning platform for corporate environments based on the triggering persuasive technology principle that try to incite users in regularly using the platform. We have evaluated the application in-the-wild in corporate environments of differently sized companies with 300 users. Users were subjected to three different conditions: no triggering, simple regular triggering, and adaptive triggering. The results show that the use of adaptive triggering in m-learning increases user engagement as well as course completion rates more than simple regular triggering and no triggering.