6 tips Custom eLearning Course Engagement
Customising your Learners’ experience is a stepping stone to success. It is a must-have if you intend to offer an immersive learning environment that will genuinely engage Learners!
Encouraging participation and producing a sense of commitment to the course and the content without overwhelming your Learners is an art. It takes a creative agency and skilled course designers to make it happen. The core tenets of building a custom learning experience, however, are child’s play if you understand what they aim to achieve!
Your course needs to be capable of engaging your target audience even when the learning material covers complex or highly detailed topics, and that’s when custom content development is absolutely vital.
Boosting Custom Learner Engagement
1) Storytelling and your audience needs
Optimising the user experience (UX) has many facets, and you need to make sure all of them hit the nail on the head. Your course needs to be appropriate for your audience and suited to your topic, which means combining the proper wording, visuals and pace to suit both elements. You wouldn’t run a course on emergency procedures in a silly, cartoonish style, right?
Whether your Learners are children, teenagers, young adults or seasoned professionals, you will have to adapt the storytelling and visual style to suit their needs. Presenting information through an engaging storytelling style also means providing the right types of context and real-world examples, so that the information becomes content your Learners actually want to engage with.
The ultimate aim is audience-appropriate content which is dynamic, emotive, and educational!
TheLearning LAB, Boosting eLearning Engagement
2) Gamification for success
Motivation drives all human interaction, and providing your Learners with the right level of motivation can make all the difference. Humans are innately driven by reward, whether real or virtual, and this is where gamification comes in strong! Allowing Learners to e.g. earn reward points which they can exchange for upgraded avatars for their profile can be incentive enough for them to want to continue. Even simple mini-games functioning as quick checks of their knowledge retainment can engage your Learners, as structuring tests in the form of games takes the stressful edge off of a course without reducing its respectability and value.
Alternating between interactive quizzes and mini-games keeps Learners on their toes, and e.g. offering a leaderboard per department can encourage gentle competition between the groups within your organisation. Using gamification to trigger a positive sense of reward in Learners does wonders for the user experience (UX), and boosts their retention of knowledge and their satisfaction with their learning experience.
3) Graphics and eLearning video
Visuals have the power to make or break your course, so getting them right should be on everyone’s priority list. Multimedia-based learning has been shown to improve engagement, retention, and Learner satisfaction in one fell swoop. People want to see videos; they crave interactive and engaging visuals increasingly quickly grow bored with plain text. We live in an increasingly video-based environment in terms of marketing, social media, general information-seeking and many other aspects of our daily lives, and learning has to follow suit!
An eLearning course entirely laid out in plain text will perform significantly less well than an identically-worded course with added segments of video, such as recaps or scenario-based examples. Other visual elements which have a huge impact on your Learners are the use of infographics and ensuring your brand's visual identity shines through within the course. Visually engaging content performs far, far better with any audience; humans simply love eye-catching content, and we assure you your Learners will both perform better and be able to retain more information if you offer them a visually stunning course.
4) Scenario-Based Learning (SBL)
Scenario-Based Learning (SBL) is similar to storytelling, but it takes your content a significant step further. Rather than telling your Learner about a concept or showing them how it can be applied, this time you actually involve them in it and place the responsibility in their hands. An interactive scenario requires your Learner to solve a problem through brainstorming and application of their learned knowledge. They can be asked to offer real-world solutions, and through this process will learn about their own bias and knowledge gaps, and be able to test various outcomes to observe the consequences of their decision-making processes.
Scenario-Based Learning (SBL) provides them with a safe environment for testing their knowledge and their real-world application of learned concepts, as well as a deeper understanding of what happens as a result of their decisions. It puts the learning into perspective in a way no theoretical content ever could!
TheLearning LAB: interactive eLearning content design for the real world. Geneva, London, Paris and Palo Alto
5) Blended Learning
Not all Learners thrive when working alone; some need a sense of community. Combining the self-paced aspects of e-learning with real-time online sessions, or classroom sessions, or even planned chatroom discussions, can help those Learners who need that extra spark of motivation or whose learning style requires structured contact with others. This also allows you to incorporate creative and Learner-led assignments into the mix, such as pre-recorded audiovisual presentations to be submitted by your Learners. These assignments can then be discussed in real-time with one another during a structured classroom session, bringing a great learning experience through both receiving feedback and undertakingng peer analysis.
Depending on your Learners and their real-life connectedness, contact on course discussion forums may well be disjointed and inconsistent, with low engagement being a risk if the cohort doesn't feel sufficiently connected to one another. This dips into the realm of ensuring you have a healthy corporate learning culture where learning and interacting with the course are seen not only as a must but as also as a desirable activity to be undertaking.
Using Blended Learning in the form of live discussion sessions encourages the Learners to engage with the materials prior to the session, as they’ll have a chance to use it in a setting with peers, and when used in combination with elements such as gamification it helps to boost that healthy edge of friendly competition and desire for self-improvement that we ideally want to see among Learners!
6) Feedback and performance optimisation
Your Learners are individuals with their own specific needs, difficulties, skills and interests. This means that there may be aspects of your course which work particularly well for 80% of the Learners, but there's that 20% of Learners who aren't fully satisfied. Given the chance to do so, they may ask you if you could include more, e.g., infographics. Finding out what your Learners do or don't appreciate, where the common sticking points are, and if there are any quick fixes which can make their Learning experience even better takes having a dedicated feedback plan.
Allowing your Learners to e.g. provide anonymous feedback allows them to be entirely honest without fear of any repercussions, and provides you with valuable information. The feedback cycle should always be in effect, collating student feedback as you go along. As they explore their eLearning platform, you could request feedback at regular intervals and ensure you actually do improve any bugs or issues they report. Engagement rises when confidence in the course itself rises, so taking feedback into account and respecting the Learner perspective means empowering them to take charge of their own learning.
Likewise, offering detailed feedback to your Learners when they complete an assessed piece of work, allows them to take full advantage of all the course materials on offer and refer to materials relevant to their knowledge gaps. A good paragraph of feedback does more for a Learner than a simple grade, that’s no secret! If you want to boost their performance within their role, feedback is a key part of the process of professional development.
TheLearning LAB, Boosting Learner Engagement. Geneva, Paris, PaloAlto, London.
And last, but not least..
7) Make navigating the course intuitive
The Learning Management System (LMS) you use for your course needs to be as user-friendly as can possibly be, with optimised navigation, an easy overview of all the Learner’s courses and modules, and easy to access quiz results and general progress information. Navigating the course should never be a challenge, which is why we personally recommend our own web-based, video-first Learning Management System LMS LAB. Whichever LMS your organisation makes use of should have a user experience (UX) optimised front end for the Learners as well as an optimised Back-end for the administrators who oversee the course.
Every navigational aid within your course needs to serve a proper purpose, be clearly visible, and indicate without a doubt where it will navigate the Learner to. Your materials should also be optimised for use on mobile devices, ideally through a dedicated application, so that your Learners can access it absolutely anywhere and at any time. Test it out a few times before it goes live, have someone who isn’t familiar with the system try their hand at it, and see whether their user experience (UX) is sufficiently smooth. If it isn’t, fix the flagged issues asap!
So, that’s the low-down on custom learning engagement!
There’s a lot more to custom learning engagement than initially meets the eye, as it exists across all levels of eLearning design and planning. Armed with these tips you’re on the right track for success, but if in doubt there are always agencies who can step in to help. Here at TheLearning LAB, we know how to engage Learners and how to optimise and customise your e-learning course to the highest possible level.