Ways to make eLearning more engaging
As large numbers of people are now working and learning from home, making your eLearning interactive and engaging is more important than ever. Having interactive eLearning is the difference between your learners being engaged in your learning material and becoming bored and giving up.
Below are some ways you can add engagement to your eLearning.
1. Gaming Elements
Having gaming elements in your eLearning can be a very effective way to increase engagement. Adding gaming elements such as characters, stories, badges or levels can take your traditional eLearning and add a level of depth to it. For example, you could add a guide or character to your eLearning that teaches the learner about a specific subject. Instead of just using generic narration, having a guide that teachers the learner and is with them throughout the course can be much more engaging and relatable to the learner and makes the course seem less static.
2. Knowledge Checks
Knowledge Checks are typically questions that are place periodically throughout an eLearning course. The purpose of Knowledge Checks is to test learners on what they have just learned, and reinforces what they understand about the learning content. One option for a knowledge check could be a multiple-choice question in which the learner has to select one answer from a list of answers, however this is a very common form of knowledge check. Other knowledge checks you could use are drag and drop style knowledge checks where the learner has to drag answers into certain areas of the screen or fill in the blank style questions where the learner has to type the answer. Adding Knowledge Checks can be an effective way to keep learners engaged and focused on what you are teaching them.
3. Animations
Adding animations can be a quick and effective way to make your eLearning more engaging. Animations can vary greatly in complexity and will take different amounts of time to develop. If you are short on time one of the most effective things you can do is to use the built-in animations that you can find in authoring tools such as Articulate or Captivate. By applying these built-in animations to text and images you can make a static page much more appealing in a short time. For example, you might animate a bullet list of text to fly in, you might have pictures fade in and out or you might have icons appear on the screen at certain points in time to help visualise something.
