Articuland Tour: Toronto

This is a great question! Great to see all the tips.

When I have someone say they'd like to see more engaging course, it can feel ambiguous. I'll dig a little deeper and ask them what would make a course engaging to them? Or, tell me when you were most engaged in a digital course?

This removes the guesswork or assumptions. In the conversation, I share that having learners practice the actions they want them to perform throughout a realistic story based practice scenario--really engages the learner. 

So I ask the SME the actions the leaner needs to perform, find out the consequences, what good and bad looks like, and challenges they face each day.

Instructional and LXD takes both science and creative art. With social media channels like YouTube, people seek learning relevant, when they need it (familiar right?), and entertaining (aka engaging) but now the stakes are even higher. The commodity is Attention.

Your SMEs want engaging courses and behavior change. Find out what that looks like to them. With Edutainment on social media, we need to consider a social media mindset.

I find making the learning story based (on the learner's reality) is very engaging. I'll interweave some cinematic video elements to set the mood. And keep it moving in short lively bursts.

I keep inspiring myself. See Vyond's spring masterclass recording with Rachel Kisela sharing how to get off the charts engagement.

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.

Lance, first let me say I think this is such a good question, and one that lots of people face with their leadership. Sometimes leaders who don't come from a course-building/instructional design world just think of engagement as "make more things for the learner to click on" which just leads to more slides and more layers. 

But ultimately I would say that the goal of the course is behavior change (assuming it is a performance-based course and not some kind of annual compliance training). The more real-life types of decisions you can get the learner to make inside the course, with real-world types of consequences, the better. Rather than a quiz question that asks how you'd handle an upset customer, and then providing the standard "That's right" or "Sorry, that's incorrect" type feedback, branch to another slide where the situation has escalated if the customer is still unhappy, and a different slide if the response was one that would resolve the upset customer situation.

Nicole, thanks for your comments. These are all helpful for engagement! Thanks again.

Hi Lance, 

I use a mix of voiceovers, engaging questions at the end of training or module, and also interactive by chunking material and using triggers to either show bullet points, or have that have the user click on a graphic to learn more about a key concept (below is an example), etc. Key terms are bolded and in a different color to help with easy identification and retention. I'm fairly new at designing, but hope these help!