Designing Successful eLearning – Adding Interactivity
It is important for any organization that’s investing in elearning to make sure the courses they provide are of the highest quality. When developing your own courses, one of the best ways of improving the learning material and making sure that students get the most benefit from the course is by adding interactivity. Interactive training has been shown to be more engaging and produce better learning results in studies across many industries, such as this one from the field of engineering. There is “support for the core elements of active, collaborative, cooperative and problem-based learning“.
If you are responsible for designing successful elearning, read on for tips on adding interactivity to make it more interesting, fun and effective.
Use interactive scenarios based on real-life work situations
One of the best ways of engaging the learner is by including real-life situations that show how the learning material can be applied to actual work situations. Using images and/or video to show a scenario in which the learning material is applied and adding a small quiz or game afterwards (known as gamification in the field of elearning) will help make learning more challenging and the content more memorable.
Make the elearning course social
Encourage learners to collaborate with each other by adding a forum, social media page or chat room to the elearning course. Encourage students throughout the course to take any questions or comments they have to other students through any of the available communication channels. Adding a collaborative element will allow students to share their experience and discuss learning topics. It can also help improve student understanding and retention of the course material.
Make it look good
Adding multimedia elements to your course and designing it to look more aesthetically appealing will increase the desire to interact with the content. Use good looking and easy to read fonts. Add attention grabbing graphic elements such as images, infographics and videos that provide additional information to help the learner better understand the material. Also make sure that you maintain a consistent style throughout the course.
Add quizzes throughout
After each lesson or section you could add a test. If your learning platform delivers tracking of progress, this will help the creators/facilitators gauge how effective their course is, as well as allowing students to assess their progress and get an overview of what they learned. Include real-life scenarios in the quizzes so students can get an idea of how they would use their newly acquired knowledge/skills in the workplace.
Including quizzes helps break up the learning content, preventing students from getting bored. It can also help improve retention rates.
High quality elearning can have a significant impact on your organization’s training delivery and consequently, its bottom line. Designing more interactive elearning courses will help boost organizational learning and improve your competitive edge.