Use Animation To Innovate Your Outdated Courses
As society progresses, training and learning demands change as well, affecting the eLearning industry greatly. People will need to learn new skills and your content will undoubtedly have to keep up. But is it enough? What signs indicate that your eLearning course is lagging behind? What can you do to boost it up?
3 Signs That Your eLearning Courses Are Lagging Behind
If the courses fail to help your learners deal with their daily challenges in the workplace, it’s high time for an update. So without further ado, here are 3 signs that your eLearning courses are outdated and need a good makeover.
Learners Struggle To Finish The Course
This shows that the learning content doesn’t match the learners’ skills and creates a learning gap. When evaluating, keep track of the following metrics:
- How long does it take for learners to complete a course?
- Do learners go over certain sessions repeatedly? Or do they skip most of them?
- Are they doing surprisingly well in assessments? Or do they have to retake quizzes too many times?
- Do they ask a lot of questions because they haven’t understood the material?
Too often, learners struggle to finish plainly due to bad learning experience, which is a huge distraction itself. It can be the functionality of the course, or its design, or its delivery methods. Bad learning experience is a huge turn-off and will drive people away from your course.
The Drop-Out Rate Is High
This is fairly simple, time is a valuable resource and everyone is busy these days. A good amount of people actually prefer courses that they can finish in one go, while most prefer courses divided into bite-sized lessons that they can go through at short intervals.
Sessions that are too long will definitely cause learners inconvenience. And since eLearning is on the rise, consumers have a plethora of choices to go with, and sooner or later, your course will be forgotten.
The Visuals Of Your Course Are Too Dull
Your course content may have been developed by the best minds in the industry. But how can you make a good first impression on learners who have just peaked at your course for the first time? One thing to remember is that long courses with jumbled slides, repeated layouts, illegible fonts, etc., significantly lower learners’ motivation and engagement.
Why Animation Is The Solution To Your Outdated eLearning Courses
Of course, there are many aspects of a course you should revise before deciding where to put effort in for updating purposes. In the context of this article, I would suggest one approach to fix the mentioned problems: animation. Animation not only works as a visual aid but also creates an environment where learners can truly enjoy the lessons, thus lessening the drop-out rate and orienting learners to expected actions.
Animation Condenses Information
Scientists have pointed out that animation is superb for representing abstract concepts, phenomena, and processes, thus making learning faster by cutting out the heavy mental tasks.
A 5-minute animated video can contain the amount of knowledge that would take learners hours, if not days, to go through. Take this video for example, and imagine how a fresher can absorb information about agriculture without the help of visuals. Thanks to its wonderful forte in storytelling, animation also makes learners feel like the course is much faster than it is.
Animation Enhances The Online Learning Experience
The reasons that many learners left the courses undone as mentioned above might be due to the fact that the courses’ content does not fit their expectations, there is improper content distribution, or the format of delivering knowledge drains them out as the lesson processes. While the first reason requires deeper research for you to come up with concrete solutions, the latter belong to the field of learning experience. And that you can improve with animation.
Animation has many attributes that would help create a positive eLearning experience for your audience. Besides being a splendid explainer, animation does spark joy in the learning sessions with vivid objects and characters. Movies and cartoons have taught us that in many cases, visuals really worth thousands of words. In recent years, another format of learning, gamification, has gained huge attention and become an irresistible trend. Learners can follow a plot and gain the necessary skills or knowledge along the way [1]. While the plot sets courses apart and creates competitive advantages, animation plays a huge role in visualizing the content and keeps the learners interested.
Animation Increases Learning Outcomes
Animation is an excellent explainer. It makes things easy to understand with stories. Instead of classifying lessons into systems, animation gives learners an opportunity to look at things as parts of a story and then piece them together.
In the long run, using animation and motion graphics will avoid cognitive exhaustion and overload, which directly affect learners’ motivation and ultimately lead to better learning outcomes.
How To Utilize Animation To Innovate Your Online Courses
When it comes to educational animation, chances are you will have to make a whole series to cover the topic rather than just 1 or 2 videos. So without further ado, here are 5 tips on how to make a series of education animation, especially when you’re on a budget.
- Identify your purpose
- Use animation to simplify concepts and make the lessons eye-catching and engaging.
- Don’t waste time and money animating decorative, distracting videos.
- Don’t animate the whole course
- Let animation be a small part of the lecture only.
- Animations are great for phenomena that are invisible to the naked eye.
- Create short videos
- Present only the main points.
- The ideal video length is 3-5 minutes.
- Pick an appropriate style
- Motion graphics: use vectors to decrease the number of hand-drawn frames.
- Whiteboard animation: showcase graphic assets on a white background.
- For online courses, you don’t have to go with 3D animation or hand-drawn 2D because they’re costly to make and they can be distracting to the learners.
- Consider between animation tools or animation partners
- For simple, dialogue-based animation, go with online animation tools or seek a freelancer, which will only cost you about $30/month.
- For more complex animation, find an external vendor. Small animation studios in developing countries offer budget-friendly services. However, the cost greatly decides the quality of your animation. Also, go with an animation studio that expertise in education, that would save you a lot of time explaining.
Conclusion
Times are changing and maybe you should reevaluate your course, it might need an update. You’ll have a lot of work to do, but don’t forget to start small. In this case, we’re talking about animation, an all-in-one solution that both advances the quality of the course and enriches the learning experience. If you’re ready to get into the idea of educational animation, feel free to contact us!
References:
[1] Academic Integrity | Medical Education Animation (by F.Learning Studio)