Ideas for VERY dry content

Most of the material I get given is dry....very dry :(

But it's up to me to make it as interesting and engaging as possible, sometimes it's hard to do but it can be done....

I try to add in some for of interaction every 4-5 slides, a couple of self-assessment questions at the end of every section and if possible add content from YouTube

Put yourself in the position of the learner and try to stimulate as many sense as possible

It doesn't always work but all we can do is try :)

One thing I like to do is look for inspiration outside of eLearning. There are two sites that have been very inspirational in the past are Jellyvision (from the makers of You Don't Know Jack) and Epipheo.  But you can find inspirations in almost anything from marketing ads to games.

Once again, I appreciate all of your suggestions and recommendations!  It's great to hear different ways to think about this project, and how to incorporate more interesting interactions when appropriate.  Thanks again!

Hey Jen, first of all, welcome to the adventure of eLearning!

As for the content, one way we bring some life into less than exciting content is to explore how that content actually appears and is interacted with in "real world" practice. We begin by collecting as many stories as we can about times the content was actually applied...looking for both good and not-so good examples of how things went. We take those individual stories and begin weaving our own, larger story, that eventually becomes the learning activity itself.

We've taken this approach with things like mortgage regulations (want to talk about dull?), policies around replacing heavy equipment (yawn), and yet another course on workplace harassment. Beginning with stories of actual use is our first step towards creating experience-based activities that work for us.

Enjoy the eLearning ride!

John

ImagiLearning, Inc. 

I like Michelle Leon's response! Mainly because that's what I was gonna say!

There's a lot to it, though.

Well-written stories do a lot of things besides just engage your audience. If you can demonstrate that you get the audience's challenges in this regard, you could garner a lot of buy-in from people who need to feel as though the training channel empathizes with their plight. In other words, it gives you a lot of credibility.

I have another suggestion that worked well in a policy heavy course that I built last year. Try to add in some humor or funny cartoon comics. It really helped to lighten up the course.

This topic of boring content comes up often for many of us in the field. As outlined above the solutions generally revolve around three key steps.  What I will add is that those three steps be taken in this particular order....

1. Focus on what you want them to DO, not everything SMEs think they need to KNOW.
2. Be relentless in completely removing, or attach as reference only, EVERYTHING that is not minimally required for the what the learner must be able to DO after the training (see #1).   This includes focusing only on the 80% situations , not the once in a blue moon situations they won't remember anyways without a job aid/reference.
3. Then (and only then), look for fun, interactive, graphical, creative ways to deliver what remains.

Hope this helps!

I haven't gone through all the comments, so pardon me if someone has already said this.

Perhaps you can try to build the process into a journey and tell a story from the point of view of a 'dollar character'. What the 'dollar' bumps into during the process and how it got split up into different accounts, etc.

I turn boring, abstract and complex training into comics and/or series of cartoons. The key to bring financial/legal stuff alive is to come up with a story  (some good suggestions in this thread on how to do that) and then come up with a visual metaphor. The problem with abstract information like finance is that you can't take a photo of it - it doesn't "exist" in real life. Hence the visual metaphor that brings it to life. Here's a piece I did as part of a management training course.

Me and my colleagues do this type of work all the time (turn complex information into fun visual stories), feel free to drop me a line if you need more ideas: www.businessillustrator.com

Just finished visiting Virpi's site, and tracking it through to a presentation she made about Yammer (http://businessgoessocial.net/spc14/). It is all very worth visiting and taking a look at. If you've been involved with training for any length of time, you can appreciate how unusual it is to see anything like this that's so really fresh and worthwhile. HT to Virpi for sharing.