Making lesson content and courses that are more interesting and engaging can be difficult when it comes to eLearning. But why does it happen? Why is eLearning usually not engaging enough? Well, unlike classrooms, in eLearning scenarios there is no teacher or instructor. Thus, there are no means to gauge out the learners and decide who is interested and who is simply flaking out. Instructors fill those gaps and adjust the learning to bring the learners back to track; which is not an option in eLearning.
The overall engagement and interest of the learners depend on their own curiosity and the extent of the content’s capability to be engaging in any usual eLearning scenario. Thus it is very important to make the course content in such a way that it keeps the learner hooked and curious enough to not ‘pass on’ to the learning experience.
So, if you want to make compelling eLearning content and don’t know where to start, here are some great tips and tools that can help you out!
Keeping things Practical
Let the learner understand the importance of the lesson or course by seeing the practicality of what is being taught. By using scenarios for real world practices, let the learner face the potential questions, conflicts and dilemmas and then let them make choices in a safe-to-fail environment. By setting up questions and giving the lesson content a context helps to make it possible for the learner to draw parallels between the lesson and the real world.
Making the course more relevant to the job and making the learner aware of the relevance can also work wonders as one of the biggest key ingredients of Adult learning is ‘relevance’ i.e. the learner will only be interested if they find the lesson relevant and profitable to their work.
Making things more Visual
Visual Aids have been proven to be the most important and effective tools in any kind of learning. So, incorporate more photos, videos, stock photos, relevant background, illustrations and small animations to make the content more comprehensible and focusable.
Keeping the writing style interesting is also very important. No one likes to be bombarded with information or complex long sentences that they cannot read in a breath. Thus using shorter sentences, active voices, strong verbs and solid nouns can do the trick when paired up well with infographics, aesthetic but relevant backgrounds and illustrations.
Keeping it interactive
Something that works even better than static visual tools is interactive visual tools. Through interaction you can enhance the learning through imagery and also promote exploration among the learners as they look forward to get answers and get their curiosity satisfied. Interactive tools are a great way to keep the learner hooked as they have that ‘suspense’ element in them and work on the basis of principles of human curiosity.
It also helps in making the content a little less text heavy and keeps the screen clean so that the learner doesn’t feel overwhelmed. The interactive designs are choice based and make the learner feel a sense of control on the amount of information that they are taking in.
Making lessons more ‘human’
Aim to convey the emotion more than just push the information onto the learner. Bullet points are a great way to memorize but do they actually help the learner understand and feel the issue and the solution to the issue? Not really.
So, the best way to tackle this is to make the course feel more human and personal by using pictures or illustrations that tell a story and convey the emotions that the learner can relate to. Maybe show the distress because of a conflict or a problem and then show the contentment and joy that comes out of the solution.
Conclusion:
At the end of the day it is all about making eLearning more interesting, effective and engaging. But there are always limitations (e.g. budget, deadline, content bulk) to the resources that can be used to make more compelling courses. Thus, the only way to make it happen is to use a LMS like iSpring Learn that lets you design courses in just a day while letting you incorporate as much visual and interactive media as you want.