Every course designer aims to create e-learning that is effective and successful. Ask most learners, and these words will not be the first that come to their mind when they describe their experience taking an e-learning course.
Most learners will agree that these examples are boring. It’s usually deathly dull. What can we do to ensure that our e-learning course design is effective and successful for both the learners and their organisations?
Many e-learning course designers are looking for ways to make their courses more engaging and interesting. They often use authoring tools and multimedia to achieve this.
A tech-driven classroom allows students to interact and engage with the content. Interactive Learning Management Systems (ILMS) are the minimum requirement for your classroom today. They encourage learning to be productive and interactive. You may wonder how LMS tools can make learning interactive. We will look at 5 ways that LMS can help you create the most rewarding and productive classes.
This seems to be a good idea on the surface. It’s better to have learners interact with the content than simply read it, right? Initially, yes. This approach can be very effective, but it is also very boring for learners. Dragging and dropping objects across the screen may seem interesting and fun the first few times, but after twenty repetitions, it’s not as clever.
It doesn’t take long for learners to realize that using multimedia and interactives is just a way to cover up a bigger problem: too much emphasis on content.
Course designers have a wide range of options when creating classroom training. When you have a group that can interact and engage with each other, it is easy to design imaginative classroom activities and exercises.
The challenge for an instructional designer is much greater when faced with a blank screen. How can you make this blank screen engaging and interesting for your learners, without spending a lot of money or taking months to develop?
You will probably fill the screen with content, and then add a graphic or an interaction to make it look more appealing and interesting.
You will likely quickly realise the importance of keeping a lot of screens with content organised and structured if you choose to follow this approach. You’ll be sucked in to a content-centric development approach before you know it.
1. Betters Organization of Content
Do you send training materials via email or do you give hard copies of the material to your students? Are all the materials prepared for training on different hard drives or flash drives? This is a hassle for both you, the trainer, and your trainees. Learning Management System organizes the content into a single database, removing all clutter. This means that all your learners will be able access the material whenever they wish, which is a great way to improve the learning outcome.
2. Gamify training
You would have read about gamification’s popularity and acceptance in today’s society. Modern training and education aims to be fun and interactive. It is simply a way to incorporate the gaming elements into training and learning. With game-like elements, you can create quizzes and puzzles for your trainees. This encourages healthy competition between students and makes learning more fun.
3. Tracking the Performance of Trainees
One of the core goals as a trainer is to make sure that your efforts are aimed at the end result, i.e. Retention of knowledge and improvements in skills. Interactive Learning Management Systems can make your trainings more productive. The best LMS platforms have integrated modules for performance tracking that let you conduct tests and other assessments with your trainees. These tools will allow you to standardize your entire assessment process and determine the progress of trainees as well as their knowledge retention levels. LMS tools have advanced metrics to help track scores, create a leaderboard, and highlight the progress of individual students.
4. Make Learning Social
You don’t have to physically gather all your trainees if you use an interactive Learning Management System. The organization can save money by running classes through webcasting or video conferencing. It also makes the training process more social, as trainees of different backgrounds and geographies can be included in a single classroom. It improves communication and argumentation, which improves the quality and quantity of debates and discussions. Social learning allows you to share your training through platforms like Facebook and Twitter, which helps increase brand awareness and visibility.
5. Learn on Demand
In any classroom, not all students will have the same personality. Some students are active and extrovert learners who thrive in a crowd, while others are introverts who don’t like being around a lot of people. They don’t perform at their best. This category of students is the most benefited by interactive learning management systems, as they can remotely access classrooms and participate in larger discussions from the comfort of their home. Numerous studies conducted on introverts have shown that the on-demand method of learning has improved their learning curve.
Once you take this path, you will be well on your way to creating an online version of a high-end PowerPoint presentation or a glorified ebook. Both results may look professional and appealing, but they will not be effective for learning.
Instead of creating highly structured content, with additional multimedia and interaction, designers should focus on creating scenario-driven learning approaches that are memorable and motivating for learners.
