What does engagement mean to you...?

We create safety training in my group, which is usually mandated by some regulation or institutional policy--it's basically all compliance training: how to properly dispose of your hazardous waste, how to work with biological agents at various risk levels, how to work safely with chemicals, etc.

There is always a long list of rules and regulations, but we don't create courses that info-dump these rules or regulations. What we do instead is create the following:

• Field guides. These are short, ideally 1-page front-and-back, printable guides that capture the crucial rules and limits that someone would need to know in order to make decisions and take actions. By putting this into a printable guide, we reduce the need to spend time on drill-and-kill sections in the course itself, and it reduces the memory burden on the learner.
• Photographs of actual work locations that fill the entire screen. If the course is about handling chemicals, then this photograph would be of a work location in a research lab. If it's about preventing oil spills from contaminating local waterways, then this might be a photograph of a large storage tank of oil in its actual location at our site. The idea is that this photograph provides the work location context for both the information and activities that would take place in this space. It should fill the screen so that learners feel like they are immersed in the space (i.e., actually working there).
• Small text boxes overlaid on top of the background photo to call attention to relevant parts of the image. For example, in a hazardous waste course, the background photo might show 3 bins under the benchtop in a research laboratory, each bin containing different containers of different kinds of hazardous waste or different sizes of hazardous waste containers. We'd place small text boxes, maybe with an arrow pointing to each bin or container, along with a short text description ("This is a 5-gallon flam-can. When full, it can weigh about 50 pounds, so don't try to lift or move it; use it in place."). We'll often string these short little textboxes together with OK or Continue buttons if we have more to say than will fit in a small text box. It's very important that these boxes be small, because we want the learner to still be able to see most of the background image so they still feel like they are "in" the space.
• Questions whose answer choices are either actions or evaluations, not facts. For example, after we explain what kind of waste is in each of the three bins, we might ask a question like "Click the bin where you will put your flammable waste." Putting your waste in a bin is an ACTION. Or, we might ask something like "What do you think? Is the 33 gallon capacity of this secondary containment pallet enough for the three 55-gallon oil drums you want to put here?" The answer to a question like that is an EVALUATION.

With just these four elements, you can create surprisingly immersive learning that is way more engaging than typical information-oriented courses could ever hope to achieve. Learners feel like they are actually practicing the skills they are learning, as they are involved in taking actions and making decisions throughout the course.