E-Learning Challenge Submission: Making Static Content More Interactive!

Participating in the Weekly E-Learning Challenge

This week I thought it would be fun to participate in the Weekly E-Learning Challenge, "hosted" by Articulate Community Manager David Anderson on a weekly basis. The weekly e-learning challenge is an awesome way for e-learning designers to get their creative gears going and come up with the fun projects they don't typically get asked to do at work. It's a great way to get experience, try new things, and create cool sample projects to show off in your portfolio.

I really like this week's topic (Converting Static Content into Interactive Knowledge Checks), which is all about turning static (read: boring) content into more fun and engaging content, simply by using a freeform interaction or something similar. You can turn your content into a pick-one, pick-many, drag and drop, etc. Those are just a few of the options available to you. 

Using Articulate Quizmaker '13

I decided to do this week's challenge using the awesome new Quizmaker '13. It (like Storyline) offers the super powerful feature of creating freeform slides. Basically it allows you to very easily and painlessly turn any objects, text or images on a slide into interactive quiz objects. In this case, I had a simple content slide that I had built in Powerpoint for a WiFi e-learning project I'm working on.

In my Presenter project, I simply created a new Freeform "pick one" slide in Quizmaker '13 and copy/pasted over the elements from my Powerpoint slide. I then just used the easy form to select my options and correct choice for the quiz. I took a few moments to format my feedback slides and the Results slide, and voila! In about 5 minutes, I've created an interactive knowledge check from some basic, static content. 

Check out the published version: Converting Static Content into an Interactive Knowledge Check - Before and After

Before: Static Content Slide

After: Interactive Knowledge Check

As you can see, I use basically the same elements on each slide, except in one case it's a boring, read-only slide. In the second case, it's a more engaging and thought-provoking knowledge check. It presents similar information but in a way that makes the learner think critically!

Hope you guys like this example, and hope you'll also take part in this week's e-learning challenge, as well as the future ones to come! Also, if you're interesting in getting more e-learning tips, you can follow us on Twitter.