4 Tips for Adding Sizzle to Your eLearning Courses to Increase Visual Engagement
With the increase in the use of the Internet in both our personal and professional lives, people are looking for eLearning course that are above and beyond a level one interactivity (a level one eLearning course, can essentially be defined as an animated PowerPoint, that can be used in an online environment. For a good overview of the 4 levels of eLearning interactivity refer to this recent article posted at eLearning industry).
When you are a vendor, you need to be able to demonstrate value, and produce eLearning that is at least comparable (but preferably better) to what an internal training team could develop. Over the last few years our team of full-time programmers at Pathways Training and eLearning Inc. have come up with some innovative and interesting ways of adding visual appeal to eLearning courses, beyond what is typically done by using traditional eLearning activities (e.g. activities and templates offered in eLearning authoring tools like Captivate or Storyline 360).
Here are some easy and amazing eLearning interactions, that our programming team has used recently to add sizzle to client’s eLearning courses, to really increase visual engagement.
1. Use 3D animated graphics to add visual appeal to eLearning screens – Rather than just using static graphics, why not use an animated graphic that move, creating visual engagement and augmenting the key learning points on the screen.
2. Add streaming video to the background of your eLearning course – If you have slides that have a lot of text and audio or where it is hard to continuously add graphics appearing in and out, try adding a video in the background. This effect adds “sizzle” to any eLearning course, and it adds a new level of visual appeal. As this effect is relatively new and not many training teams are using video in this way, eLearning courses that have video in the background appear new and more visually appealing than a traditional eLearning course with static graphics.
3. Add a polling feature to your eLearning – Recently one of our programmers added a polling feature to a course that allowed learners to complete a poll. Learners could see how other people who had taken the eLearning course had scored, as the poll was a cumulative summary of all learners results. This activity was SCORM wrapped and tracking of results and answers were stored on the client’s LMS.
4. Add a sticky note “build-on” activity within the course to summarize learning and to generate collaboration and interest among peers – Last week, one of our programmers, used third party software to add a summary activity to an eLearning course where learners were able to type on a sticky note what they learned from the course. When a new learner took the eLearning course, they would be able to see what people from across the organization had written on the various sticky notes, and they were able to build on comments from across the organization, when they added their own sticky note as well.
Applying any of these quick tips to your eLearning will immediately increase the level of visual engagement. To see how the programmers at Pathways Training and eLearning use these features in eLearning, please contact us at 1-888-961-6011 extension 121 or at info@pathwaysinc.ca for a demo of some of our engaging eLearning work.
