Want to create interactive courses but don’t know where to begin? Read to learn about the most effective instructional design strategies for increased interactivity.
A teacher or instructor is the driving force behind any classroom learning session. He/she communicates topical knowledge with the learners, engages them with various discussions or questions, clears their doubts, and ensures their attention doesn’t stray much during the course. An e-learning course has to do all of the above, only without the presence of an instructor. That’s where the real challenge lies.
To compensate for the absence of a teacher and communicate better with learners, e-learning courses use interactive elements. Interactive learning makes your employees part of the learning process as opposed to being passive spectators. For topics that are difficult on the mind, interactive learning techniques help take the edge off and ensure necessary knowledge reaches the target audience. Interactivity largely increases the appeal of your course as it ceases to be a bland entity with loads of content, and becomes something that can facilitate communication. Let’s see some elements online courses can incorporate to make e-learning courses more interactive:
1. Reality Scenarios
Stories are a powerful way to captivate your learner’s attention. It creates an engaging, emotional, and impactful learning experience, which stays with your employees long after the training is done. A scenario and story-based instructional design approach, adds a great deal of context to the subject at hand with interesting elements such as a narrative, thought-provoking plots, relatable characters, and a strong message at the end. Employees need to interact with the console at various stages of the story to progress. You can use such a design strategy for trainings such as Behavioral, Sales, Compliance trainings.
2. Game-based Learning
In case you need to convey certain topics that require the repetitive application of a principle to master it, you can opt for game-based content. It essentially means creating a fully playable game around your subject matter. By playing the game, your employees will become highly proficient in the subject matter. Learning games can be termed as the epitome of interactivity, as the learner has to constantly perform some action to progress. The immersion that games offer can scarcely be replicated by any other instructional design technique.
3. Microlearning Modules
Microlearning delivers content in short bite-sized courses that convey just one topic comprehensively. This strategy fits in nicely to supplement the full-length training course your learners might have already undertaken. Since this conveys just one topic in a short time, it is ideal to be used as just-in-time performance support. These short modules can be designed to be very interactive with video snippets, animations, flip cards, and more.
You can also prompt learners to take certain courses based on their interests or give suggestions for further learning of a topic they might have already studied, such as updates. Techniques like this allow your e-learning program to “talk” with your learners and assist them in further learning.
4. Social Media Plugins
Why end the learning process when the course ends? Learning courses should ignite a spark of curiosity in your learners that compels them to continue learning even though they are not required to. Including social media plugins in your digital learning modules can act as the first step in doing this. This allows your learners to interact with other learners, share their course progress, get into intellectual discussions, clear doubts, and much more. It boosts employee interest and makes learning a sought-after activity.
5. Feedbacks & Assessments
When your e-learning course communicates with your learners on so many levels, it is only natural that your learners should also be allowed to do the same. Assessments gives your learner just the opportunity to do that. Along with learner performance, feedback allows course developers and managers know how well the course is performing in terms of imparting them new knowledge or skills. Developers and other stakeholders can use this data to continuously improve courses to better suit the audience. This reverse interactivity plays a huge role in creating an optimum learning experience.
Since you have already taken the step to create a digital learning program, you might as well develop it in the right manner. Use the above interactive elements to develop a course that talks to your learners as well as an instructor does.
