How To Create An Engaging eLearning Experience

How To Create An Engaging eLearning Experience
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Summary: In a world with a high demand for on-demand applications, eLearning platforms let users learn effortlessly any time they want. eLearning platforms allow everyone from any corner of the world the ability to gain knowledge in no time. Let us understand the importance of engagement in eLearning.

Leading Strategies To Build Effective Online Courses

The virtual learning experience can be made more interactive with the help of state-of-the-art technology present today. The advanced features of learning management platforms can strategize the learning process in a more engaging and interactive way, which is far better than real-time teaching or learning experiences. It is well-known that meaningful interactions during the learning process can enhance the understanding of a concept.

Gamification and engagement have become more common and also crucial in most industries; this is nothing new to the eLearning industry. With an efficient LMS, you can provide collaborative pathways to students or eLearners to adapt concepts effortlessly. eLearning can create a way better eLearning experience if it is built with skilled LMS developers. Let’s explore some of the popular ways to enhance student engagement on eLearning platforms.

In a world with a high demand for on-demand applications, eLearning platforms let users learn effortlessly any time they want. eLearning platforms allow anyone from any corner of the world to gain knowledge in no time. Let us understand the importance of engagement in eLearning.

Why Engagement Is Important In eLearning

If you ask any eLearning developer about the major challenges in developing a Learning Management System, their instant answer would be to make the boring content more interesting to the user in order to keep them engaged in the learning process. With the advancements in technology, you can now easily engage the learner with interesting color schemes, a collaborative quiz, and many other gamification features.

Things to consider before creating an engaging eLearning experience:

  • Know your learners
  • Set clear learning objectives
  • Make it interactive
  • Follow an organized roadmap
  • Keep the modules short
  • Attract your audience with visuals
  • Kindle their curiosity quotient
  • Make known the importance of the course
  • Let them explore the additional references
  • Make them proud of the results

The above are the most important strategies for creating highly effective courses. All eLearning professionals should consider these significant factors before curating their content.

LMS platforms make learning more efficient with many effective features such as:

  • Visual experience
  • Meaningful interactions
  • Gamification

Many notable features of learning management platforms are built by skilled developers in order to provide an enhanced User Interface and User Experience. Let’s see what all of these factors mean in detail.

1. Visual Experience

You can easily capture your audience with attractive visuals that bring them toward your delightful content. To the human mind, visual effects actually represent the quality of the content inside your course. That is why they say not to judge a book by its cover. Don’t let your audience judge your content quality just because of the visual effects.

The truth is that even if your content is great, your learners might find it difficult to engage in your course if it isn't visually appealing. You don’t need to be a visual designer to build beautiful courses. Let’s unveil the key ingredients that contribute to a good design that fulfills our visual senses. Know the basics in regard to color, color-contrast, repetition, alignment, and balance.

The following list unveils how you can apply them to your course.

Color

Colors hold the power to evoke one’s feelings very powerfully within seconds. It strikes through the subconscious mind of the user that visits your learning platform. So, it is important to choose a color that associates with your eLearning content.

You don’t need a color scientist to choose the right color that is effective for your course. It is suggested to use tools, like a color wheel, to come up with a color scheme for your LMS. You can also choose a monochromatic color scheme if you are a minimalist.

Contrast

As said already, a color makes more sense when in contrast with other colors. You can easily win this game when your color scheme is well-designed with perfect contrast. The contrast colors make an illusion that one color is being highlighted or given more importance than the others. You can differentiate important parts of content or text with good contrast colors. Create a pleasant platform that comes together in order to present your content to the user.

Tip: Use a sans-serif font for the text on navigation and a serif font for text on your slide. Play around with warm colors and cold colors to create a color scheme for each course.

Repetition

It is always better to follow the same design for a course and you can make minor changes to the others. It can be quite intimidating, confusing, and overwhelming for the audience if the template has too many colors, shapes, and elements. Repetition is one of the basic fundamental rules in designing that creates a cohesive and organized feeling in the user’s mind. So, make sure all the fonts' weight and size are the same throughout the course.

Alignment

Most of our minds can’t take a crooked design or alignment, which is why it is considered important in a design. Line up the elements and also be aware of the shape of each element in the template. This means making sure that each element is put up equidistantly by using tools like grids or rulers.

Balance

One of the other important design factors that you should consider is the distribution of visual weight or balance. Some of the ingredients that contribute to visual weight are the size, color intensity, and the element itself. This creates an imbalance between different parts of the template. Position small and large elements relative to each other in order to solve this issue. You can also play around with different colors, shapes, textures, and objects to space out the visual weightage of a specific area.

2. Meaningful Interactions

Once you have grabbed your users with your compelling visual design, you need to make them learn your course by creating meaningful interactions. To keep them actively engaged, you should priorly make them interact with the screen throughout the course. Here are the following strategies to make meaningful interactions.

Discovery

Humans are naturally inquisitive, make sure to get the most out of it to enhance your eLearning content. The users are excited and tempted to discover new things. Don’t disappoint the users with boring content. Instead, add elements that attract their interest using visual content and media. Media interactions, like a video or an image, augmented with a clear cut message to the user, keep them engaged and inquisitive.

Questions

In addition to discovery, let the user think deeply about your questions. The conversational content never fails to keep them on track. Attract your user to the content and keep it all relative. Make sure to ask engaging questions instead of some random questions. Let them get involved personally and think, from their end, how to find an answer to a question.

Problem-Solving

Solving problems is one of the ways to make interactions more meaningful. Make them feel related to their experience. Lure even reluctant learners by making them think about how to solve a simple problem that they actually face in real life. At this point, you should give them a purpose or a reason to start or continue the course. Explain how and why it is important to solve the problems right now. This will help you easily retain your users as well as build a meaningful relationship.

Contextual Relevance

Create real-life scenarios that are associated with a problem or the context to motivate them to solve it. Also, ensure that you are connecting it with the learning objectives. By the end of the course, ensure that the user has to solve the problem and overcome the scenario.

Break it down into decision points, consequences, and how to overcome objections.

3. Gamification

Gamification can make anything effortless by adding a dash of motivation, curiosity, and interest in the user’s mind. In order to define gamification in the learning management platform, it should involve curating an experience that lets the user interact continuously in order to face the challenge and get dynamic feedback from the decisions they have taken or the work they have done.

Add more gamification elements to your eLearning course to encourage your user. You can also make use of different tools that are easily available to do this. At least start adding gamification elements to your courses, like a simple word game or something. You should first develop a challenge. You can provide many small challenges that finally resolve one big challenge.

The most important thing that you should do is tie the learning objectives into the challenges. Some of the most commonly used gamification elements to motive users are given below.

Leaderboards

It is one of the ways to make your learners competitive. They do the course with this competitive edge to compete with the other players to beat the top score. So, it is considered one of the main and most competitive gamification elements. It encourages them to achieve the first position. The idea behind this is that they will gain public recognition among the group and be praised.

Points

Anything that can be measured or quantified is considered as an improvement. So points are one of the best ways to represent the progress or understanding of their learning. It is also motivating for the user to earn points after completing a list of tasks or completing a part of the course. These points can also be used to unlock new levels of courses or anything else that represents progress.

Certificates Or Badges

If you wanted to provide something of worth from gamification, you can provide a tangible reward, such as a valid certificate and a badge. Certificates make more sense and can also be incorporated or mentioned in their resumes. You can make them complete their goals and access their knowledge in order to provide them with a certificate. It gives them the feeling that completing online training is worth their time. You can also give this certificate for a price or with an expiration date to entice them to take the test again pretty soon.

Collectables

Humans enjoy collecting items. Let's consider this, if two corporate learners are competing for a collectible, a challenge can be provided to both of them and the winning one bags the collectible. Likewise in the games, this makes eLearning more interactive and social.

Course Currency

Money is a real motivator and you should definitely use that to your advantage by creating a course currency for your corporate online training. So that this currency can be used to unlock more online training courses and exclusive content, access helpful tips or even purchase rewards. Also, ensure that the currency does not have any monetary value.

Keys

It is important to arrange all the above gamification elements in an appropriate order, unveiling them one by one after successful completion. The rewards or points must help the user unlock the next level. You can also make this more exciting by providing exclusive content to the users who reach a certain position on the scoreboard.

At the end of the day, the learner learns it with enthusiasm and also recommends the course to other eLearners. Always provide feedback to the user once they are done and don’t forget to appreciate their efforts. There are many other ways that might work for some industries and not for other industries. But the strategies are similar in most of the industries when it comes to eLearning. Indeed, eLearning can be made more engaging for learning than real-life classrooms.