Making e-learning interesting!

“Hi! My Name is Victoria and I am your trainer for the day!” A female electronic voice with a perfect accent intones while I start playing a domain specific e-learning module. The voice further detailed what the course entailed with numerous graphics and text on the screen. I was in a hurry to move over to the next side, however I couldn’t do so, till ‘Victoria’ finished her narration.

Most of the e-learning modules that I’ve gone through start in the same way. This got me thinking, if I am being so impatient, do all the learners feel the same?

Today organizations invest heavily into e-learning to make the programs accessible to everybody anywhere. Yet, one finds these programs are the ones that need the maximum branding. More often than not, they need to be made mandatory for increasing participation.

I believe, in addition to making training available anywhere, anytime it also needs to be made relevant to the new age learner. In the day and age of instant gratification, we need to re-look at the programs especially the e-learning programs that we offer. While there will be many things that we can discuss following are three things we can keep in mind while designing the course:

1.      Purpose: Most of the e-learning modules begin with the purpose of increasing knowledge. For example: I have information on the Insurance domain and this should be passed on to the learners and hence an e-learning module is created. Various learning theories, learner styles are kept in mind and we add videos, quizzes and learning summary to make the modules interesting. However interesting is not equivalent to relevant.

To make the program relevant we need to ask the stake holders and ourselves some different questions.

“Why do you need the course” ”What is the purpose?” “What do the participants need in the real life/on the job?” “Presuming that training will help, can I design activities that will help the participants acquire those skills/attitude?”

When we will start asking these questions, hopefully the information dump approach that plagues majority of the e-learning modules will reduce.

2.      Using a deductive approach: This point is in continuation of what is expressed earlier. Instead of giving user the information, which can be long and boring, design activities. Through these activities let the learners arrive at the relevant information. Instead of inducting them, let them use the deductive approach to gain required knowledge/skills/attitude. This approach I believe will be more effective in making the information/data stick rather than a mere text or bullets on the screen.

3.      Narration: Often, a monotonous voice with a slow pace is used in online modules. The same information is displayed on the monitor in the text format. This sort of implies that, all our learners are slow and will take time to absorb the information. While simply reading the text can be dull, there needs to be a balance between the two. A few options that could help resolve this can be : giving an option to keep the narrator off, providing just the key pointers on the video/slide, a choice of viewing the transcript of the entire program, providing an option of skipping the narration, or swiftly moving on to the next slide etc. This way the learner is in control of the pace of the program rather than the other way round.

While these are just of the points that come to mind when one is trying to make eLearning courses appeal to our ever younger audience, I am sure that there is many more that can be considered. For example, Smart phones have had an enormous impact in how we live our lives, can we think about incorporating them in our learning experience? Or how about leveraging the social networks or even gamifying the whole course? What do you think? I look at this article as means of starting a conversation about eLearning courses that is long overdue. Look forward to your comments.