elearning strategies

Converting Manuals into eLearning by Adding Engagement

Converting Manuals into eLearning by Adding Engagement

Instructional designers are often given the task of turning manuals into eLearning. That sounds easy enough given that the manuals are already a finished product that say what they need to say. But we know that there are core differences between these types of resources; that’s why it’s usually not the best approach to dump a stack of manuals on a new employee. Manuals are intended to communicate specific steps in the briefest way possible. They are structured to be easily referenced and are mostly print focused. They assume you already know what to do with the information they are presenting. eLearning, on the other hand, is intended to be an experience that brings the learner to the point where they can do something they couldn’t before. So, we’ll look at converting manuals into eLearning by adding engagement; ways to keep the learner’s interest and attention.

Here are some areas to consider in when looking for opportunities to add engagement to some otherwise dry manuals. And to do it without change the accuracy of the information being taught.

Structure & Guidance

Structure is the order you present your content and how you transition between concepts. Learners remember things they were previously told about (priming), things that appear at the beginning and end of a list (primacy and recency effects), and things that are grouped together logically (segmenting). Learners also benefit from context, stating where the knowledge is relevant and what you should already know before starting the course.

These and many other learning effects can be used to structure your content. Consider how you can use segment and order the information. Furthermore, provide details on what you’ll learn in this course and what you should already know before getting started.

Suggestions

  • Break up and order your content in a way that makes sense to learners
  • Use introduction and summary activities to bookend chapters
  • Navigate and transition through each topic to tell a story or illustrate a workflow

Informal communication

If formal communication is the barebones text of the manual (the absolute minimum of what you need to know), informal communication is everything else around that. These are the pieces that explain the concepts or share personal anecdotes. Where formal communication is succinct and accurate (like a dictionary definition), informal communication can highlight, clarify, or provide motivation. Think about how you would explain a concept in person to someone who isn’t getting it right away–  you wouldn’t tell the learner to just read the definition over and over again. Instead, find ways to add a personal touch where it might be needed most.

Converting Manuals into eLearning by Adding Engagement

Suggestions

  • Include additional explanations in a casual tone separate from the “main” readings
  • Share anecdotes and stories that complement the materials
  • Suggest common mistakes and how to avoid them

Multimedia

Multimedia means simply using more than one media to communicate your information. Undoubtedly, some knowledge work best as videos, infographics, or simulations. You wouldn’t try to teach someone to tie their shoe using plain text. In the same way, we want to find the best way to illustrate your concepts beyond text. Visual diagrams, infographics, and animations are better at showing processes and relationships. These kinds of multimedia, when used correctly, are much more likely to stick with the learner.

Suggestions

Feedback

Feedback provides immediate information to the learner in response to an action. Consider how often teachers ask their students “do you get it?”. They do this to ensure the learner is following along and to gauge if more explanation is needed. It also produces new opportunities to teach when learners have their brains working on a challenge. Think of your eLearning course as a kind of teacher that anticipates when to check-in on its learners. Find ways to add feedback events in your training.

Suggestions

  • Prompt learners to get their input throughout the content with interactive elements
  • Give meaningful feedback beyond right and wrong
  • Show outcomes based on the learner’s response

Application

Application shows how the knowledge being taught is used in a new situation and context. It’s important for learners to see theoretical concepts applied in reality, possible variations, and repetition of consistent elements. Altogether, these experiences help learners understand the knowledge far more than just reading the usual manual descriptions and steps.  

Suggestions

  • Use case studies and examples to illustrate concepts in action
  • Provide practice problems and questions the learner can use repeatedly

Assessment

Assessment involves checking that the learner actually understands what they need to. This helps prevent learners from moving on unless the have adequate knowledge of the materials. Formative assessments are used along the way to find out areas where the learner needs improvement. Summative assessments occur at the end to confirm the learner understands the content.

Suggestions

  • Add knowledge check questions along the way to keep learners on the right track
  • Use quizzes and exams at the end of chapters to prove learners know their stuff

Conclusion

While it may seem to be a simple and common task, converting manuals into eLearning gets at the core value of instructional design. Manuals serve an important purpose in every organization, but they do not satisfy training requirements by themselves. That’s why we suggest converting manuals into eLearning by adding engagement and .

The next time you are given a manual and are asked to “you know, make it engaging”, try comparing your materials with areas above. Hopefully they inspire ideas that build on the core materials with a little extra engagement.

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A Practical Approach to Designing Interactive eLearning

A Practical Approach to Designing Interactive eLearning

eLearning and interactivity complement each other naturally. eLearning is all about teaching with the help of electronic tools. Meanwhile, interactivity encourages learners to apply their knowledge in a safe and educational environment that gives them immediate feedback and speeds up learning. Together, this increases the effectiveness of training. But it can be hard for instructional designers to keep up with the demand for interactivity. What’s missing is a practical approach to designing interactive eLearning.

In this article we’ll take a look at why interactivity works so well with eLearning. We’ll also look at some practical ways to include interactivity using interactive elements embedded in the training content. This means presenting our eLearning in the usual way (through text and multimedia), but finding opportunities to embed interactive elements into the material to keep learners engaged.

Why Interactivity

There are many reasons to include interactivity to enhance your content; looking good and being fun may be the most popular goals but there are also benefits that improve learning. Here are a few outcomes of interactivity used well:

  • Communicate complex ideas quickly: Condense complex ideas and concepts into a quick activity that illustrates the information by having the learners do them.
  • Provide instant feedback: Show the learner the outcomes of their decisions or guess right away. Knowing that you’re wrong makes you much more likely to remember when you are corrected.
  • Make your learners curious and motivated: Use your learner’s curiosity to encourage them to find the answers themselves.
  • Use heuristics and garden path visualization for memory: How you receive knowledge can determine how to retrieve it again later. Create interactions that associate the new knowledge with other concepts or details that are easier to remember together.
  • Simulate real situations: Create interactions that ask the learner to apply their knowledge in a realistic situation.
  • Encourage repetition: Repetition is a useful tool for learning and memory. Use interactivity to encourage users to try multiple times to find out more or achieve a higher score. Each time they try it helps build their memory of it.

Things to watch out for when adding interactivity:

  • Incorrect representations: One of the worst things you can do as an educator is spread incorrect information. Make sure the interactivity you create is accurate to the knowledge you are teaching. This can be tricky if you are not the subject matter expert and must extrapolate your activity from other content. In this case, review it with your subject matter expert to ensure you’ve interpreted the information correctly.
  • Unrelated or distracting content: You are already asking your learner to sit through all your learning content—make sure every minute of it will be useful to them! Interactivity just for the sake of fun might actually slow down the learning process.
  • Adding confusion: Interactive elements often mean introducing new interface controls. Keep these simple and consistent. You don’t want learners getting stuck because they can’t figure out how to navigate your content.
  • Time and cost: Lastly, it’s important to plan and keep track of budgets and schedules

How Interactivity

The more interactive and engaging you can design your experiences, the better. However, now comes the hard work of creating these interactions. I’ve met lots of instructional designers who, when they felt interactivity was needed, fell into one of two extremes. They would either become over ambitious and try to create a whole “game”, or they would fall back on just displaying the bare content.

  • Purchasing: Go out and buy pre-made content.
  • Programming and development: You and your team create your own from scratch.
  • Creating with tools: software such as Articulate Storyline, Adobe Captivate, or LMS authoring tools (such as Fabric LMS) allow you to create interactivity within coding.

As you might guess, time and cost become major factors when designing eLearning with interactivity in mind. Each interaction could end up like a mini app or game; and the more you want, the more you have to build.

Interactive Elements: A practical approach

For most of us, we have limited time and resources to create effective eLearning. That’s why the best approach I have seen to creating interactive online content is also the most practical. Interactivity is not an all-or-nothing situation, think of each interaction (whether purchased, programmed, or authored) as an element that you can integrate into the rest of your content.

  • Mix media: Use a combination of media to present your training. Text and images are easy and effective ways to deliver training. Videos require more resources but are best suited for certain content. Pick just the key points that would benefit the most with interactivity and turn those into interactive elements.
  • Plan consistent interactions throughout the content: Try to space interactivity apart and build on each interaction by adding another layer of complexity each time.
  • Reuse templates, patterns, and art: The best way to keep resources in check is to reuse content. Whether it’s background, characters, icons, or checkmarks, reusing assets saves you time while keeping a consistent look and feel to your product.
  • Keep it simple: In the early stages of your design, identify which parts of your content should be interactive and implement a design that gives you the benefits you need. There are many benefits to interactivity but you can’t squeeze them all into one element!

Conclusion

Interactivity boosts your eLearning content but it is hard to get right and resource intensive. A practical approach to designing interactive eLearning means to be deliberate about the interactivity you apply to your content to get the biggest impact.

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eLearning and Scaffolding

eLearning and Scaffolding

Making your eLearning materials interactive always sounds great at the beginning of a project. Interactivity has become synonymous with engaging and fun.

But there’s a catch. Interactivity can be very tricky to execute, especially if you don’t have a deliberate and realistic design to implement right at the start. How should we design eLearning materials that are also interactive?

Interactivity for the sake of interactivity?

In many cases interactivity starts out as a suggestion to make materials less boring. This is not wrong, but should interactivity really be the ultimate goal when designing learning content?

In my experience, I’ve seen a simple desire for interactivity blow up into difficult projects that, in the end, did not see the light of day. When eLearning authors start down the path of creating content for the sake of interactivity, they risk the following outcomes:

  • The activity is not fun and is not used
  • The activity requires too much resources and is never finished
  • The activity is finished but underdeveloped and doesn’t work
  • The activity does not improve learning and wastes time
  • Interactivity is risky because it doesn’t state a specific goal you are working towards, it’s just a feeling

You might design and develop in circles trying to capture a “fun” feeling but as instructional designers we usually have compliance, assessments, ROI’s, and other things to worry about!

Effective learning should be your goal, not just interactivity. If you are looking to make your content more engaging, I suggest you start with the concept of scaffolding instead of delving into the depths of “interactivity”—and you’ll likely end up adding interactive elements along the way.

Scaffolding in eLearning

Scaffolding is the concept of providing learning supports for your learners and gradually removing those supports as the learner progresses.

Think of these supports as training wheels on a bike that are eventually taken off when the rider can balance themselves; or a teacher that teaches addition with real apples until the students have mastered the skill of apple counting.

Educators over time have found numerous creative ways to use scaffolding in their teaching, reading out loud the same lines from a textbook over and over can only go so far.

In eLearning, scaffolding can be applied in a digital medium through helpful tables, questions, info graphics, hints, all the way up to complex games. We start with the goal of reinforcing the learning and think of the best method to do that. Sometimes it doesn’t have to be “interactive” in a traditional sense. The idiom “lefty loosey, righty tighty” is a mostly true mnemonic device to help you remember which direction loosens or tightens a screw or bolt (or many other practical items).

This minor device can be a big help to students (e.g. in carpentry or auto repair); they might be able to complete example repair tasks faster or be less likely to “screw up” and feel more confident in their abilities.

Let’s say “Lefty loosey, righty tighty” is now a scaffold we want to introduce in our eLearning. It can be presented online very simply with text (maybe spice it up with some font styles or graphics). We can use animations to demonstrate the idea. We can even build an interactive game where users have to click and drag a virtual socket wrench on screen. When we start with the scaffold, we start with an idea that will help the learner learn. From there we can use text, multimedia, or interactivity to get our point across but the focus is always on the learning.

Scaffolding doesn’t specify how interactive the device is, it can be a single graphic or a full-fledged 3D simulation, it is just concerned about helping the learner in a specific situation to move on. In eLearning, we can’t hover over the learner and speak directly to them. We have to make our scaffolding activities part of the content — ask probing questions, present mnemonic devices, play a video, or more. Check if the learner gets the material and if not, provide more tools to help them get it. Engage the learner first by providing them content to help them learn (assume the learner wants to learn the materials and not struggle), then design interactive elements where appropriate.

Conclusion

When you receive the next stack of source materials to turn into an eLearning course, resist the urge to make it interactive just for the sake of interactivity (however dry the materials may be). Instead, do what teachers have been doing for ages — think about the materials and ways that you can clarify, demonstrate, and reinforce the core concepts. The difference for an eLearning instructional designer is to consider the tools you have to build and deliver the activity — they might look quite different from a teacher in the classroom but the approach is very much the same.

Are you an instructional designer looking for the cleanest and easiest way to build scaffolded eLearning content online? Get in touch with us!

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