Looking for ways to get learners more engaged in learning? Check out these three tried-and-true learning strategies.
The e-learning community seems to agree that passive, one-way learning is all but dead and buried. What is not in complete agreement, however, is the best ways to engage learners to achieve a course’s learning objectives. Let’s examine three pathways to making a training program more engaging to learners: gamification, interactive video, and action planners.
1. Gamification. Learning can be a game, and by providing goals to be reached, learners have a stake in the instruction; they have a reason to be engaged. Games engage players because they provide an environment and a context in which actions provide direct feedback and lead to direct consequences.
With games, choices allow learners to use their own creativity to select a style that is both engaging and conducive to their own learning. If the learner doesn’t find the game engaging, they are free to make other choices on their path to learning through self-discovery.
To engage the user, gamification design needs to be simple, intuitive, and user-friendly. This is a great design technique because an easy-to-use experience will appeal to any user. No one wants to be confused or frustrated because the navigation is hard to find or they don't exactly know what to type or where to click when they are finished doing a task and need to move onto the next.
Games are also engaging because they encourage failure. Players have the option to fail safely, which helps them see what happens and get a sense of the game space in which they are playing. Failing is allowed, it's acceptable, and it's part of the game. With traditional learning, this is not always the case—failing in a traditional environment precludes learners from gaining the benefits that come from making mistakes.
Gamified learning also includes obstacles that can make achieving learning objectives engaging. Without them, the course reverts to traditional one-way instruction, which can easily veer off into boredom. Obstacles create conflict, which in turn generates interest. The journey and satisfaction to conquering the obstacles is why the average user embraces the gamification style of learning.
2. Interactive videos. Interactive videos allow the learner to drive the narrative of their learning by putting the user in the middle of the action. With the emergence of mobile games, ubiquitous broadband and 4G, social media, and on-demand user experiences, people expect to be in control of their visual media. Interactive videos are very popular, and because of that, an ease of use is already in the context of the learning environment. Facebook records 8 billion video views every day. They are also extremely popular with Millennials (80 percent of whom refer to videos when trying to research/make a purchase decision).
As video becomes a bigger part of how we interact with information online, adding degrees of interactivity to educational videos is a natural progression to the medium. Viewers of interactive video can choose how deep they want to go with the content—stick to the main message or peruse side topics. As opposed to linear or traditional videos, interactive videos allow users to click, drag, scroll, hover, gesture and engage in other digital actions to interact with the video’s content, thus increasing the learner’s engagement. Branching allows for different paths a learner can take to control and customize the content they see. And perhaps most importantly, interactive video works well on most modern browsers and any device: PC, phone, or tablet, increasing accessibility and flexibility, which can easily drive engagement.
3. Action planners. In addition to forms of interactive learning like gamification and videos, including something that learners can create for themselves can do wonders for engagement. Though they can be tailored for many different purposes, an action planner is a document where learners can record their thoughts and reflections on certain problems or questions throughout the course of a training session.
Not only does the creation of an action planner give learners a document that they can refer back to as needed, but including opportunities for learners to create something new activates higher-order thinking. According to Bloom’s Taxonomy, creating is the pinnacle of learner/content interaction—it’s among the best ways for learners to retain new knowledge.
Designing training programs that engage today’s learners by using methodologies such as gamification, interactive video, and action planners and workbooks are not just desirable, but essential to hooking modern learners into an experience they can personalize to their own path, pace, and style of instruction.