instructional design

Utilizing Redundancy in eLearning

Utilizing Redundancy in eLearning

When writing a research paper or a blog article, you’re focused on keeping it short and sweet. Get to the point and move on. It can be tempting to apply the same approach to eLearning. But, on the contrary, eLearning is a medium in which saying more can be better; redundancy and repetition are tools in your instructional design toolkit. We’ll take a look at using redundancy effectively in eLearning. Mainly we’ll consider approaches to communicating the same concept in slightly different ways, at different times or different situations.

The unique thing about teaching people is that it’s your job to ensure they’ve learned what they need to learn; and that can take unique approaches for everyone. We can’t simply broadcast our piece, hope the audience gets it, and call it a day. Otherwise, why would instructional designers exist in the first place?

Good Teachers

Think of what it takes to be a good teacher. Is it one who speaks as few words as possible in their lecture? Probably not. Good teachers adapt to the needs of each student. They can identify what students are struggling with and have a follow up that helps them understand the topic better. Maybe they ask a meaningful question, tell a relatable story, or use a role-play activity. And if the first follow up doesn’t do the job, they’ll keep trying. Good teachers have many tools available to help everyone, not just the straight “A” whiz kids.

Why Redundancy is Worth the Effort

When we say redundancy, we don’t mean chanting the same phrase over and over (although that might be effective for brainwashing). We mean it in the good teacher way: preparing alternative explanations in your content for learners who might need it. This might take the form of additional multimedia, questions, feedback, examples, activities, and more. eLearning is about helping the stragglers, not just the people who already get it.

The concern about this kind of redundancy is that it is more work to create because more explanations mean more content.  When we are on a time crunch, it’s normal to ask why create content that only 10% of users might need. However, it is an instructional designer’s job to create the necessary redundancy to teach as many people as possible. That 10% is your main audience, they are the ones who need training (your product) the most.

Adding Good Redundancy

The interactive nature of eLearning offers instructional designers an opportunity to add redundant content that only appear when needed. Additional explanations shouldn’t slow down learners who understood the content on the first try and are ready to move on. Your design should integrate these pieces into the content as a response to user input in the same way a teacher responds to their student.

Provide learners with ways to access the extra content by interacting with it. Display content when learners answer questions incorrectly or choose to dig deeper. Don’t just display everything at once and overwhelm them. Think of more possibilities, cases, common mistakes, etc. that expand on the core concept. Go several layers deep. Collect information from students and subject matter experts; find out what needs further explanation.

A Practical Approach to Using Redundancy Effectively in eLearning

Here is an approach you might use to fully teach a new concept. Start with the core concept but anticipate ways the learner might misunderstand it or questions they might have. A subject matter expert would be able to provide a lot of suggestions in this area. Build content blocks for this additional information but prompt the learner before displaying them. Think of it as a “choose your own adventure” design where more content is presented as the learner interacts with it.

Here is a set of possible ways to explain and re-explain a concept in a lesson. The notes marked with an asterisk are potential core steps that always appear. The rest are optional content that only appear if prompted.

Utilizing Redundancy in eLearning
  • Introduce the main concept*
  • Provide examples
  • Explain it again using additional graphics or analogies
  • Ask questions related to the materials *
  • Provide hints and clarification for wrong answers
  • Cover common mistakes and misconceptions
  • Display links to additional resources
  • Summarize the core ideas and take-aways*
  • Provide resources and job aids that can be used later
  • Add a frequently asked question about this topic
  • Provide a way to collect feedback and questions– respond to them!

Just running through this hypothetical list, we have created 11 different avenues to explain a key concept. However, only 4 of these show up at first; the rest are designed to appear only if the learner expands the section or answers a question incorrectly.

While some learners might have all they need from the core steps, they are likely a small minority and our work as instructional designers is not done. Each additional resource might help a greater and greater percentage of learners understand the content.

Conclusion

Redundancy can be a good thing in eLearning but it’s all in how you apply it. Most learners need multiple attempts to truly grasp a new concept. Instructional designers are constantly challenged to provide a experiences that help push learners over that milestone. We have to anticipate where learners could get lost and prepare content to get them back on track. Consequently, we also have to find clever ways to check if the learner needs to see the content or not. These are all things to consider in using redundancy effectively in eLearning because redundancy itself is neither right or wrong– it’s how you use it.

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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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Designing Instructional Workflows

When creating a corporate training program today, we can no longer just dump a pile of manuals on the learner. If members of Gen Z entering the workforce are known to hate micromanaging managers, we need to use technology to help guide them by designing instructional workflows, not just providing stacks of readings.

Content and Experience

Many of us are used to thinking about training programs in a content-first way. If there is a training problem, the first question you might ask yourself is “what can a learner read or watch that will address this problem?” From there we might create content until we’ve built up a sizable library of materials to address our many documented problems. But does this help a new employee who is just learning the ropes?

In addition to producing lots of content, we need to think in terms of workflows. By workflows, I mean planning the experiences that make up your training program; whether it’s a new employee, a new role, or a change of operations.

Documenting and Designing Instructional Workflows

The series of experiences that make up a training program should flow together smoothly in the most logical way. Likewise, the knowledge learned (or assessed) should match the medium used to teach. We want to optimize synchronous training time (time spent with an instructor) vs asynchronous (time spent learning alone) and get the best of both worlds.

Documenting your workflow is the important first step. Draw a flowchart that describes each of the learner’s steps. Here are a few ideas on how to structure your flow chart to capture the critical aspects of your design.

  • Learning content: This is the media or activity learners must experience such as e-learning modules or instructor-led training.
  • Interactions: an interaction often is needed to be able to say the required training was completed. This might mean passing an automated test, signing a form, or having an instructor mark a submission.
  • Conditions: these conditions must be met before the learner can move on to the next step. Some examples of conditions might include: completing prerequisites, having a manager schedule the next learning content, or waiting for time released content.

A Quick Example

When using the pieces above to create a flow chart, we can indicate the experience that the learner in a particular role will go through.

In this example, learners must complete the orientation e-learning prerequisite before they can move on. As a part of the compliance training, we’ll collect their e-signatures. Next, they must schedule an on-site training with their manager. 1 week later, we’ll assign them product knowledge training.

By laying our plan out as a workflow, we can see when key tasks should be done and know who is responsible for moving the process forward. We can also step back and check that our learning goals are being met by our design.

Tracking Workflows

After a workflow has been implemented, we want to be able to track learners as they progress through it. Ideally, tracking completions and conditions is integrated into your LMS but simple tools (such as a spreadsheet) can help. Documenting and tracking workflows also helps you analyze the effectiveness of your training program and make improvements.

Conclusion

Thinking in terms of training workflows helps us lay out the path learners should take, identify areas of complexity, and discover ways to improve the program. It’s only after you have a well-planned workflow that you should start putting pen to paper. As learners demand more self-paced and guided training programs, instructional designers are going to have to adapt our approaches and tools to create solutions that work.

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A Doctor Patient Model of eLearning

A Doctor Patient Model of eLearning

As instructional designers, it can be easy to feel like our jobs boil down to creating content and passing it on down the factory line. Sometimes, our work schedules can make it seem like that is all there is. However, our end goal isn’t to publish content endlessly, it’s to help our audience learn what they need to know. That’s why I suggest a doctor patient model of eLearning.

We can think of the relationship between instructional designers and their audience as a doctor patient relationship. Obviously, doctors are responsible for their patients’ health. They know how to tell if a person is “healthy”. If a person is not healthy, they have ways to identify what is wrong and recommend treatments to help the patient get better.

Diagnosis and Treatment

Instructional designers are responsible for our learners’ education. We need to know what a “healthy” learner looks like. We need measurable indicators that we can compare against each learner. Instead of blood pressure, body temperature, and vitamin levels, we use workplace performance and knowledge levels as indicators. Instead of stethoscopes and thermometers, we use quizzes and checklists.

To oversimplify, a doctor is responsible for diagnosing a patient that has a problem and prescribing treatment to help with that problem. Doctors specialize in knowing what “healthy” means, identifying the causes of unhealthy problems, and suggesting treatment that will help bring the patient up to and beyond healthy levels.

Tools For a Doctor Patient Model of Elearning

What tools do instructional designers use? For diagnosis, we might use quizzes and reviews to see if our patient meets the baselines. These tools can further help identify the precise things a learner struggles with.

For treatment, we might assign eLearning content such as videos, readings, and exercises. And after treatment, we need to keep following up to ensure it worked.

A Different Paradigm for Instructional Design

If we see instructional design as a patient doctor relationship, how might that change how we do our job? I think we need to get past the idea that instructional designers are just there to constantly roll out treatments. Here are some ways I think we can apply a doctor patient approach to eLearning:

  • Better identify baselines: do you know how to tell if somebody can do their job?
  • Develop a personalized plan to help new learners reach their baseline
  • Use the right tools to diagnose problems: do you have adequate ways to tell if a user is ready to do their job? Can you accurately identify problems?
  • Use the right tools to treat problems: does your content achieve its goals? do you have tools that address specific problems?
  • Follow up with your treatment: do you have ways to follow up to ensure the tools worked once they’ve been used?

Modern training programs must deal with increasingly specialized knowledge and as a result our eLearning models need to be more deliberate about how we interact with learners. A doctor patient model of eLearning helps us with this very problem. You wouldn’t want a doctor that gives all their patients the same advice without any tests; likewise, an instructional designer needs to do more than publish generic eLearning content.

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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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What’s in Your Instructional Design Tech Kit

What’s in Your Instructional Design Tech Kit?

Hello learning professionals! When you’ve been working in training for a while, you get attached to the stuff you work with (and the people too I guess). In this blog post, I want to share about some of the tools that have become part of my everyday work and why I think every instructional designer should consider them.

The laptop is the main workhorse in your kit; it goes with you to the office, out in the field and at the café. The MS Surface Book was first released in 2015 and immediately became an instructional designer’s dream machine.

Its big selling point was a detachable screen and pen input. That meant that you could flip the screen around and use it as a digital notepad. The fact that the pen input feels accurate and natural means it’s great for sketching storyboards, outlines, workflows, diagrams and more.

Add to that great battery life and enough power for most instructional design work (writing, web administration, light graphic design) and it’s a great fit for any instructional designer. You’ll definitely be bringing it to any brainstorming discussions, info collection meetings, and authoring crunch sessions.

Sometimes you need some good old fashioned power from your machine and that’s why I still keep a decent desktop PC handy.

A desktop is still the best way to get the most power for your dollar and as an instructional designer, I put that extra power towards compiling Storyline projects, rendering video, processing graphics, and more.

My current build has an AMD Ryzen 5 2600 CPU, 16GB DDR4 RAM, and an NVIDIA RTX 2070 graphics card running it. That’s enough to cut lots of time off rendering video and provides a smooth experience on even the most processor-intensive jobs.

Every instructional designer needs a reliable camera. It is there with you for formal video shoots whether it’s documenting procedures, instructions, lectures, or an interview. You might need it for capturing information in the moment while out in the field.

A good camera means clear results that look professional and gives you lots to work with if you are editing videos, creating technical documentation, or programming interactive applications.

I use a Panasonic GX85 because it is a great compact mirrorless camera that is easy to carry along for still photos, but also produces excellent video. That’s due to high quality image stabilization that you usually don’t get in a small camera. Remember if you are shooting video to bring a good tripod, microphone, and lights to get the best results!

A big part of an instructional designer’s job is delivering live or recorded video presentations. Nothing is less professional than a bad sounding presentation with distorted, hard to understand audio. A good microphone gives you clear, professional sounding audio and makes your voice sound even better.

The Blue Yeti is a classic microphone that sounds great and is easy to use. Just plug it into your USB slot and it works on almost any device.

Lastly everybody needs a good phone for work. Your phone often becomes your primary emailing, messaging, calendar, and meeting device. It might not be an exciting choice, but I use an Asus Zenphone because it does all of the above without breaking a sweat and doesn’t do much else. The Android ecosystem means that I have every app I need for emailing, web browsing, scheduling, and more.

Conclusion

That covers my daily devices and how they fit into my daily routine. Do you have tools that you use that you feel every instructional designer or LMS admin needs to hear about? Do you have questions about any of the devices about and how they might fit your everyday work? Write us a comment below or contact us at support@cogcentric.com!

Learn more about Cogcentric and our customizable Fabric LMS!

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Instructional Design Skills on Your Team

Instructional Design Skills on Your Team

Creating a world-class training program, like most other big projects, is not the responsibility of a single person; it takes a team to make something great. Think about all the pieces a learner touches when they go through an effective training program — administrators, instructors, online infrastructure,  multimedia, online resources, live training, assessments, etc.

Training programs are complex things made up of multimedia, processes, and design and more that require a wide array of skills.

You don’t want one person’s DIY project to represent your entire company’s knowledge,  workflows, and best practices; you want the best talent for each job!

Here are some areas of expertise and skills you want on your training team to create an awe-inspiring training program. It’s likely you will find people who can wear multiple hats but it can’t all rest on the shoulders of one person.

Instructional Design

This is an instructional design focused blog so obviously it’s going to be on here. ID is the skill of collecting your learning requirements, designing the end-to-end process of how learners are trained and assessed to meet those requirements. The plan created by the ID determines how all other aspects of the program are produced.

A training program without instructional design might miss the point of training despite doing everything else right. You need instructional design skills to analyze your organization, design curriculum, build training prototypes, create effective assessment strategies, and interpret the results.

Writing

Whether writing scripts for a video, technical documentation, or chapters in a training manual, communicating clearly is essential in training. A training program without good writing is confusing, vague, and a slog to get through. Writers take key points and concepts and convey them in the most effective way regardless of the medium they are writing in.

Presenting

It’s not easy capturing the attention of your audience and delivering your knowledge smoothly and effectively. Having a great presenter means great live seminars, webinars, and recordings that draws in your learners. A training program without good presenters means you might be losing you learner’s attention even though your learning content is solid.

Graphics

Graphics in the form of info-graphics, charts, illustrations, styles, and more take your materials to the next level and helps your learners easily conceptualize, understand, memorize your content. It’s not just about looking good, but taking difficult concepts and bringing them to life (looking good helps too!). A training program without graphics lacks clarity and memorability.

Video filming and editing

Multimedia is a great way to present your learning content with presentations, demonstrations, workflows, animations, and much more. In many cases, multimedia is the best way to teach your lesson (could you teach someone to tie a shoe with written text alone?). Video filming and editing skills open up many possibilities for your training program.

Software development

Programmers make systems work or multiple systems work together. If you need to store data from an online form, automate a process that takes lots of human hours, or create a completely custom workflow, you will need software development skills on your team.

Conclusion

Who is on your training team and how do you divide your tasks based on their skills? Do you have the skills on your team to create a great training program? Identifying the skills required and dividing your roles up optimally means having a great end product for your efforts.

Learn more about Cogcentric and our customizable Fabric LMS!

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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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