Engagement With the Use of Interactivity: How to Spice up Boring eLearning and Make it More Appealing

One of the challenges eLearning poses is engagement or, more precisely, lack of it! Learners often find that the learning they signed up for isn’t as interesting or engaging as they were expecting. Most eLearning courses deliver a lot of great content that learners should find useful – but they don’t! That’s because course designers and developers use static, passive approaches to delivering that content. The real question, therefore, is: How do you turn your passive, static content into something appealing, interactive, and engaging to your audience?

Lost Opportunities

Course designers often don’t realize the fact that when it comes to producing successful eLearning outcomes, “useful” and “engaging” are two sides of the same coin. Engaging courses that don’t deliver useful content aren’t very helpful – and vice versa. At times, the pressure to create mandatory training overrides the necessity to produce courses that are both engaging and useful for the audience. Consequently, businesses waste a lot of time, energy, money, and resources developing eLearning that learners don’t benefit from:

• They’re often irrelevant and boring
• They lack a motivational aspect to them
• Learners don’t engage with the content
• They don’t result in “sticky” learning
• There’s no learning transference in the workplace

Learners need the motivation to engage, interact with, and complete a course. Learning with the above characteristics, however, is a lost opportunity to motivate them. In short – if a course is passive in its approach; if it isn’t engaging to the learner; if it isn’t relevant to his/her work; or if employees don’t feel compelled to interact with it, the learning program won’t deliver its learning objectives.

Value in Learner Engagement

One of the key benefits for organizations, in offering engaging learning, is that it delivers measurable learning outcomes:

• More learners will interact with your content: When eLearning content is engaging, it captures the learners' attention and encourages them to actively participate. Engaged learners are more likely to start the course, explore its content, and invest time in their learning journey. This increased interaction with the content is crucial for knowledge acquisition and skill development.
• Greater knowledge retention means less need for refresher and remediation training: Engaged learners tend to retain information more effectively. When learners are actively engaged in the learning process, they are more likely to remember and apply what they've learned. This leads to a reduced need for refresher or remediation training because the initial learning is more effective and longer-lasting.
• Higher interest levels translate to higher course sign-up and completion (fewer dropouts): A key benefit of learner engagement is its positive impact on course enrollment and completion rates. When courses are engaging and align with learners' interests, they are more likely to sign up in the first place. Furthermore, engagement motivates learners to progress through the course, reducing dropout rates and ensuring a higher percentage of learners successfully completing the training.
• High levels of engagement also result in better knowledge transfer, greater employee productivity, and job performance improvements: Engaged learners are not only more likely to retain knowledge but also to apply it effectively in their roles. This leads to improved knowledge transfer from the training environment to real-world situations. As employees apply what they've learned, they become more productive and contribute to better job performance. Engaged employees are often more motivated, enthusiastic, and confident in their abilities, which further enhances their overall job performance.

Better learning engagement delivers better, and more precisely measurable, overall learning outcomes. It helps employees apply what they’ve learned and enhances motivation and satisfaction in the workforce. It also improves employee retention: A satisfied employee is a loyal employee who’ll likely remain with the company for a long while.

Strategies and Tactics to Build Learner Engagement

So, how do you garner greater learner engagement with your eLearning courses? The secret is to move away from static, passive content, and into delivering more interactive learning experiences. Highly interactive courses generate greater engagement and more learner satisfaction. To produce that level of interactivity, L&D teams can use various strategies, including:

• Interactive storytelling: Accomplish this by knitting interactive stories, with learners adopting the persona of one of the characters, into real-world scenarios. As the course progresses, learners become more involved in determining how the plot unfolds.

TACTICS WORTH CONSIDERING:

1. Create branching scenarios where learners make decisions that impact the storyline and outcomes.
2. Use multimedia elements like audio, visuals, and animations to immerse learners in the narrative.
3. Incorporate quizzes or challenges related to the story's content to keep learners engaged and assess their understanding.

• Interactive video/animation: Unlike passive content, where learners simply watch and listen, interactive video and animation encourage learner participation. Typically, through their engagement with this type of content, learners will answer probing questions or select objects to advance, leading to better learning outcomes.

TACTICS WORTH CONSIDERING:

1. -         Embed clickable hotspots within videos or animations that provide additional information or context when clicked.
2. -         Use interactive quizzes or polls during video playback to gauge comprehension and make it more engaging.
3. -         Enable learners to control the pace of the video, such as pausing or rewinding, to cater to individual learning preferences.

• Gamification: The use of game-like elements, such as badges, points, levels, and challenges, in learning experiences, motivates learners into better engagement. Not only is there an element of “fun with learning”, but active participation in the game leads to better information retention.

TACTICS WORTH CONSIDERING:

1. Introduce leaderboards and badges to encourage healthy competition among learners.
2. Create quests or missions that require learners to complete specific tasks or challenges to progress.
3. Implement a point system where learners can earn rewards for completing modules or achieving certain milestones.

• Simulations: Another effective way to get learners to engage with a course, is to motivate them into “hands-on” participation in the learning. Simulation is a way to create “learn by doing” situations, modeled on real-world use cases, that require learner engagement. This strategy is ideal when producing highly engaging technical content, where learners must apply theory to practical work-based situations.

TACTICS WORTH CONSIDERING:

1. Develop realistic job or scenario simulations where learners can apply knowledge in a practical context.
2. Allow learners to experiment and make decisions within the simulation, experiencing the consequences of their choices.
3. Provide feedback and debriefing after each simulation to facilitate reflection and learning.

• Extended Reality (XR) content: This strategy involves creating courses that leverage a broad range of interactive technologies, including Virtual Reality (VR), Augmented Reality (AR), and Mixed Reality (MR) – collectively known as XR. These tools produce immersive experiences that persuade learners to interact and participate in learning.

TACTICS WORTH CONSIDERING:

1. Design immersive virtual reality (VR) experiences for hands-on training in a safe and controlled environment.
2. Create augmented reality (AR) apps or overlays that overlay digital information on the physical world, enhancing real-world learning experiences.
3. Use mixed reality (MR) to blend physical and digital elements for interactive and engaging educational content.

• Responsiveness: Learners will likely stay away from engaging with a course that’s only available in one type of environment – such as a Windows-based desktop. Build responsiveness into your eLearning so that learners can engage through multiple devices, on the go, or at a time and place that suits their schedules.

TACTICS WORTH CONSIDERING:

1. Implement a responsive design for your e-learning platform to ensure it adapts seamlessly to various devices (e.g., smartphones, tablets, desktops).
2. Enable features like real-time chat support or AI-driven assistance to address learner questions and concerns promptly.
3. Use analytics to track learner progress and offer personalized recommendations or content suggestions based on their performance.

• Socialize your content: A great way to engage learners is by tapping into their social networks – where they engage frequently. Less formal than employer-moderated peer-group learning, Social Media learning motivates learners to interact and learn from their peers in ways that other forms of peer-to-peer learning might not.

TACTICS WORTH CONSIDERING:

1. Incorporate discussion forums or social media-style feeds where learners can interact, ask questions, and share insights.
2. Encourage peer-to-peer collaboration through group projects or collaborative assignments.
3. Host live webinars or virtual events with subject matter experts or guest speakers to foster a sense of community and connection among learners.

While these tools and technologies will help create more engaging and immersive eLearning, it’s important for L&D designers to always remember the basics of learner engagement: Keep modules short; personalize your learning to each learner’s needs; set clear, measurable, achievable learning objectives; and refresh your content frequently.

Long-form content is more likely to be boring, and tedious, and foster disengagement. Generic, one-size-fits-all modules breeds disinterest. Vague learning objectives lead to confusion and course abandonment. And stale, irrelevant, or outdated content can cause learners to quickly move on in search of something more relevant and current.

Parting Thoughts

Many organizations waste huge amounts of time and resources developing static, passive learning content that doesn’t motivate or interest their learners. To better engage learners, and encourage them to embrace eLearning, requires tapping into factors that motivate them to do so. Adding interactivity to learning is a great motivational driver that breeds learner engagement.

The use of course design features, such as interactive stories, gamification, simulations, and extended reality content, can greatly improve engagement and motivate learners to embrace eLearning. It’s also important to focus on engaging user interface (UI) design, by avoiding clutter, and keeping the interface clear from excessive “bells and whistles”. Good user experience (UX) design is the key to better engagement, as it motivates learners to interact with learning content. UI/UX also contributes to memorable learning experiences, which compels learners to return for more!

Engaged learners better apply their knowledge, resulting in improved productivity, enhanced job performance, and a reduced need for additional training or remediation. Therefore, investing in a portfolio of engaging eLearning solutions, including learning portals, microsites, and learning management systems, to enhance learner engagement, is essential for organizations seeking to maximize the value of their eLearning programs.

These strategies deliver measurable improvements to learning, including course completion, better knowledge transfer, greater retention, and enhanced work performance. They’re also instrumental in producing other favorable metrics, such as increased employee retention, and higher levels of employee motivation and satisfaction.