How do you define interactive elearning?
It’s a question I ask clients when they tell me they want an interactive elearning course. Usually they define interactive elearning with what we normally consider the “bells and whistles.” Often they mention things like fancy buttons that change colors and rollover effects.
Sometimes we laugh those off as superfluous or unnecessary interactions. But they do play an important role in interactive elearning. But they’re only part of the interactive elearning process.
One goal of interactive elearning is to craft an immersive experience. The course’s visual design needs to be contextual. It’s something we’ve reviewed before. For example, if you’re doing a course on operating room technology, you want to bring the learner into the operating room. You can do part of this by tapping into your visual voice and crafting a visually immersive screen.
Another way to create an immersive experience is to have the users interact with onscreen elements or “touch the screen.” We discussed this earlier in a blog post on how to touch the screen.
Touching the screen is key. It’s also NOT an either/or option. Regardless of how you design your course’s interactions, the learner is going to interact with it. You’ll either offer options to click, hover, or drag. And since that’s the case, you need to make sure that those onscreen interactions contribute to a high value, interactive experience that pulls the learner into the course.
Interacting with onscreen elements is an important part of elearning course design. However, the ultimate goal of your course is to meet specific learning objectives. So in that sense, I define interactive elearning as getting the learner to interact with the content. This is more than visual and tactile interactions. It includes them processing what they learn and demonstrating understanding.
Here are a few keys to crafting the right interactive experience:
Develop clear learning objectives. Why are they taking the course and what do you expect of them when they’re done? Here’s a good starting point to learn more about creating good learning objectives. Have the learners prove their understanding. With clear objectives you can develop a means for the learner to demonstrate what they’ve learned and their current level of understanding. This is more than a simple multiple choice quiz. Instead it’s the course’s activities and decision-making scenarios that prove what they know. Place their learning in a relevant context. Many elearning courses rely too much on information and not enough on performance. One way to avoid this trap is to frame the content in a context that is real to the learners. And then present the learning experience in a way that mirrors the way they work and the types of decisions they need to make. Here’s a post on how to switch from information to performance-based learning.Interactive elearning engages the learner. You can engage their senses to craft an immersive experience—make it look great and provide lots of onscreen interactivity. But you can’t stop there. You also need to get them to process the information. Place them in a relevant context and get them to make the types of decisions they’d make in real life.
Combine “touch the screen” interactivity with great decision-making and you’re on your way to building great elearning courses. What do you think?
2015 coming soon. I’m working on the calendar for next year. Some planned stops below. If you’d like to see me or one of the E-Learning Heroes Roadshows in your area, let me know.
New York
Omaha
Philadelphia
Austin
Seattle
Atlanta
Chicago
Phoenix
Also looking at some international trips.
* Touch screen graphic made with snipicons
Click here to view the elearning example.
Click here to view the elearning example.
Click here to view the example.
In a previous post, we discussed visual thinking concepts and where they fit with elearning design. Now, let’s look at ways to practice sketching your ideas so that you’re able to move past understanding the concepts and actually applying them to your course. The first step is to get a handle on the basics:Practice using the basic shapes to create specific objects. The more you practice the better you’ll become at seeing the shapes and sketching something that looks like what it’s supposed to be.
Some people have innate skills and sketching isn’t too hard to start. But many don’t have those skills and feel like they can’t do it. But they can. A key point is to feel comfortable sketching. Remember, this isn’t about becoming a graphics design professional. You want to get a feel for the flow of drawing with your pen, especially if you’re using a computer or tablet. Then develop some fluency and clarity. And that will take a little practice.Here are some practice activities.Activity 1: Create basic shapes over and over again. Work on getting lines straight and completing the desired shape in less strokes. Can you create the shape in one movement and still have it look like it’s supposed to? For example, I notice that if I create a triangle really fast, then the sides start to bow in. However, if I am more deliberate my lines remain straight. The goal is to get straighter lines at a faster speed. A circle should like a circle and not a blob. Activity 2: Creating common objects. Look around your office and identify 10 random objects. Break them down by the basic shapes and then create them a few times. For example, here’s a quick sketch of my desk. It’s mostly rectangles and a few circles.
Another thing is to recognize what makes the shape unique and identifiable. For example, an elephant stands out because of the trunk and large ears. By focusing on the essential shapes you can convey the idea of an elephant without having to create the entire thing.Activity 3: Convey concepts with your objects. Start to practice sketching whole ideas. Identify three TED videos and capture the core concepts as sketches. It may be easier to just start with three main ideas from each video. Or if that is too much, just focus on a single point. The good thing about video is that you can pause it and rewind. Here are three to help you get started:Activity 4: Improve your penmanship. Sunni Brown has some good advice in her book Doodle Revolution where she says to trace over letters. Find a font type you like and type out the ABCs and save as an image. Then load the image into your drawing app and practice tracing over the letters. Eventually you’ll develop the muscle memory to create nice legible handwriting for your sketches.When I was a Finance Specialist in the Army we were taught to use block letters so that our writing was more legible. To this day, I still do a lot of printing with block letters and it helps when I write, especially smaller text.Here are a three examples of people who do a great job sketching their ideas and are part of our industry. They also offer tips via twitter and their blogs.
John Curran of Designed for Learning. I love John’s sketches. Again, they’re not overly complicated to create, but they convey good information and the hand drawn style creates enough contrast to engage people visually.
Click here to view the demo using free icons (Storyline).
Click here to view the PowerPoint version of the template.
Close up of a Zeiss scope
As I mentioned in a previous blog post, I intend to provide a brief synopsis of each chapter of ‘Designing mlearning‘, but more importantly I intend to answer the questions that Clark poses at the end of each chapter and then pose those same questions back to you ‘Dear Reader‘