5 Ways to Make e-Learning Interactive and Engaging
In this ever-changing world, it is a necessity to keep yourself, your knowledge and your intellect up to date, to keep up with this perpetual evolution.
This is exactly why Learning Management Systems (LMS) play such an important role for professionals and why organizations are trying their best to make the learning experience effective and enjoyable for their employees.
The comfort, interest and convenience of learners are some aspects to be considered in this case. However, this is the age of distractions and there are always other obstacles that can hamper the learning journey. Keeping the learner’s interest and focus intact is essential, as is attending to their comfort and other conveniences.
Although e-learning and LMS’s today come with many features that not only drive student growth but also their engagement with a course, there are still some ways to make the entire learning experience more enjoyable.
E-learning continues to gain ground in the corporate sector. Companies implement e-learning to train their staff, streamline internal processes and expand their reach.
Rather than having an e-Learning course that talks to attendees, make the trainees part of the training process by creating interactivity. When learners can participate in the training, the content engages them, which helps to hold their interest. Use these five tips to make e-learning interactive and engaging for your next e-Learning course.
1. Tell a Story
An online course isn’t very effective if it doesn’t include interactive elements. To keep the audience interested, constant interaction and feedback is needed. Not including any interactions will affect not only the course, but the training experience as well.
Our first instincts around education are actually based around storytelling… People teaching other people using human stories. We know that story- and scenario-based learning can accelerate our time to specialize in a particular task because the story simulates the way we learn through experience. Story-based learning is more engaging than click-and-test eLearning.
People love to read biographies and novels for a reason. The reader becomes engaged and they stick it out to find out what the outcome is.
The same concept can be applied to e-Learning. It typically comes down to the examples and anecdotes behind the content and the information that is the story behind the story.
We are programmed to empathize and stories create empathy. From empathy comes personal meaning – and the ability to internalize what we learn. By incorporating stories and having people role-play or discuss scenarios, you can better teach complex skills such as problem solving, collaboration, and creativity. This keeps people coming back – and ensures they retain what they’ve learned.
2. Go Beyond Clicking “Next”
Boredom is the worst enemy of your audience engagement! If you create an interactive experience, you will have points in your favor so that your audience does not get bored.
Add some interactivity to your e-Learning courses. Getting the trainee to do more than clicking the “next” button to move to the next slide is the key to creating interactivity because it gets them thinking. At the end of each module, pull the trainee in by asking them some questions.
Provide them with a survey or rating scale that helps them assess how their personal situation relates to the information they just learned. Think of the “Cosmo Quiz” where they answer all of the questions and then see which category they fall into based on their responses. Use this easy tip to make your e-learning training interactive.
In addition, an interactive experience can be created between your audience or with the trainer with chats, video conferences or forums. In turn, the interaction with the content can also improve the motivation of the peoples: that he or she can interact with the videos, rewind, review content and next to do the training at his or her own pace.
3. Use Voiceover Audio
You can use voiceover in content. Instead of forcing learners to read and read, add audio to your e-Learning courses.
Voiceover audio has the presenter talk in the background while visuals, presentation slides, graphics or charts appear on the screen. It creates a similar experience to sitting in a classroom style setting, where the instructor is talking the students through the material. In the case of e-Learning, audio does not include background music, which can be more distracting than it is helpful in aiding the learning process.
Voiceover audio can also be listened to while exercising or driving instead of listening to regular music or even the radio. Podcasts are often long, so they need to be engaging and easy to remember so listeners don’t fall asleep. These allow the user to immerse themselves in a safe virtual experience where they can fail and thus learn.
4. Show It Instead of Telling It
If your online course is not visually appealing, you will not get your student to pay attention or be interested. The visual design and the content have to catch the attention of your learners.
Following the saying “less is more”: try to ensure that your content has little text, quality and striking images, videos, animations, or any other type of visually attractive format that attracts the attention of your learners. It is also proven that the more attractive your course is visually, the greater the engagement and commitment of the learner.
If your course content has only simple text, your learners will get bored quickly. Include pictures, graphics, videos, podcasts, and surveys in your content. Use visuals rather than text to tell the story and teach the material.
You can even use a comic book as your guide, the primary part of the storyline is the pictures and graphics. The text is only used to add thoughts and fill in the missing blanks of the storyline. This concept requires you to show the story through pictures and tell less in the way of text content.
Here are some moves you can make to keep your audience engaged:
- Include more videos in your courses
- Make your presentations more dynamic
- Bring your presentations to life using movement, zoom and spatial relationships to present the data.
- Level up your presentation with narration
- Create a narration presentation to guide your students through the slides while giving their eyes a rest and activating other senses. Narrations let you replace text-heavy slides with images and diagrams without cutting out the content.
- Make your lessons interactive
- With the eLeaP, you can create clickable quizzes, games, and other learning tools to help people explore the course topic from different angles and retain information.
5. Create Relatable Characters
Use characters or professionals in your story to which your audience can relate. In other words, make the characters match the age group, professional level, educational level and backgrounds of those attending the training. When the audience members can relate to the characters, they quickly engage to see how they can apply the content and concepts to their own lives.
A character in eLearning may be more relatable to online learners than a block of online text or graphic. By directly interacting with them, the eLearning character fosters an emotional connection between the audience and the subject matter.
It also increases motivation and engagement among learners. The use of an eLearning character who ties all of the information together is a better option than disjointed eLearning modules or activities. Learners can use eLearning characters to guide them to the next lesson, to compare and contrast related ideas, and to show the link between each eLearning module.
Positive and supportive online learning environments are made possible by eLearning characters. It is more likely for learners to remember information if they enjoy themselves and are inspired to learn. By providing guidance and a helping hand during the eLearning experience, eLearning characters facilitate this process.
Creating a perfect online learning experience for everyone is not the easiest task, but meeting and paying attention to people’s requirements can do the job.
One of the main challenges faced when creating a successful online training program is keeping the audience involved throughout the process. Creating unique, personalized content and listing the goals and benefits of taking the course can give the audience better results.
Keeping the course relevant to your audience needs, while keeping flexibility, accessibility, and other factors consistent, lays the perfect foundation for learning.
When you sprinkle in interactive activities and ways to engage learners, not only do you hold their attention, but they retain more of the information. Learners can then use the information they retain to apply it to their everyday lives.
We hope these 5 ways to make e-learning interactive and engaging have been helpful.
After deploying your interactive e-learning courses, don’t be shy about getting feedback from your users. Some companies find it hard to ask for and process feedback from employees. We have e-learning training courses from our content libraries to help you.