Have you ever been handed dry, boring content and been asked to make it into something fun and interactive? If so, you know how challenging it can be to come up with creative ways of presenting content. A great conversation recently came up in the community about this exact topic: What’s the most boring content you’ve worked with, and how did you spice it up? As usual, our community members chimed in with some wonderful tips, tricks, and best practices. Here are some of the highlights:

Richard Harknett: For an IT security course, we turned it into an exercise where they have to complete a number of scenarios in different core subject areas, such as learning how to create a strong password. We used a cute blocky character based on an old 8-bit computer game to guide them through and had a link out to a password strength-checker for them to try.

Rachel Barnum: I think scenarios in general and putting knowledge into practice (or even learning through practice, hopefully) is the ideal way of sprucing up boring content.

Jeff Kortenbosch: I mixed up the content with some challenging questions to reflect situations where they mattered, with a proper feedback loop. Super-easy setup and excited target audience.

Cary Glenn: I used cartoon-type characters and scenarios to demonstrate what could happen if the rules weren’t followed.

Stacy W: I decided to make the knowledge checks into a series of scenarios with the idea that the learner is training my two avatars and has to pose questions to them and then choose who responds appropriately.

Andrew Winner: For Code of Ethics training, I’m working on a series of scenarios—for example, you are presented with a situation and based on your knowledge of the Code, you choose an answer. You get feedback on the choice you made and have the ability to open up the relevant section of the code in a new window.

Honor McGregor: We created scenarios with four different characters who do everything wrong ...  each of the characters gets one section of the practices to demonstrate what not to do, etc.

Great advice from our E-Learning Heroes, as usual! Do you notice a common theme running through most of these comments? If you do, leave a comment below to let me know what you think it is.

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Abu Maryam
Marissa Sterl