How to Create Interactive Online Courses
One of the most effective ways to make learners more engaged in what they are doing it to make it interactive. With interactive online learning experiences, learners have no option other than to get involved and take an active role in their learning. Here are five simple ways to engage your learners by making your online learning program more interactive.
Forward-thinking course creators are turning to interactive and immersive student experiences. Getting the experience right can create invaluable moments of insight, deeper knowledge or skills acquisition, and, ultimately, an unforgettable student experience.
This is because, in interactive training, learners are active participants in their own learning process. Turning pages, clicking “next,” and sitting back to watch a video are not considered interactive eLearning activities.
Online interactive training programs are defined by the inclusion of interactive elements in courses. These interactive elements also have different extents of complexity. For example, basic courses usually don’t come with any interactive elements, leading to passive training that usually gets learners to read blocks of text, watch videos, or listen to audio clips.
Having an interactive online training program comes with a bunch of benefits. For the purpose of this post, we’re going to take a look at just four of them:
With interactive training, learners feel part of a group, they tap into their emotions and increase their knowledge retention. But, of course, aside from making a more memorable impact on your learners, immersive online training programs in general boost engagement and motivation.
For example, basic courses usually don’t come with any interactive elements, leading to passive training that usually gets learners to read blocks of text, watch videos, or listen to audio clips. Other courses include basic participant activities, like clicking or pressing hot spots and drag-and-dropping.
One of the most significant learner needs is an environment where they can freely practice the skills they’ve learned without the fear of making mistakes. An interactive online training program that simulates a controlled working environment is the solution.
Learners can visit these online learning environments repeatedly until they’ve mastered newly acquired skills and feel confident to put them into action. And since making a mistake in a simulated environment has zero impact in the physical world, they’re great for showing learners the possible consequences of making wrong choices.
In a traditional classroom setting, interactivity is facilitated by the physical closeness of individuals. You can always intervene by asking questions . Answers benefit the entire group. In class, teachers can easily distinguish motivated learners from those who are not. They are in direct contact with students who are bored, yawn, or are inattentive and can have them participate to better engage them with course material. These opportunities for participation are one of the keys to learning. For both instructors and learners, knowing that they have the possibility to participate is both reassuring and generates engagement, whether it is voluntary (a student asking a question) or forced (instructor warning the class).
In most cases, it means a “conversation” between two people or between an individual and an element that “reacts” or “acts mechanically in return”.
In addition to their first and last names, users can include on their profile: a picture, a post, the company they work for, links to social network profiles, a short “about me”, and can customize their page as desired and add course certifications. When a student logs into the LMS, they will see their colleagues in a social network-like environment that is familiar and reassuring. It feels like talking with “real” people from other social networks (Skype, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.). A best practice is to fill out your profile page thoroughly and regularly encourage learners to do the same.
A best practice is to fill out your profile page thoroughly and regularly encourage learners to do the same. Lastly, the opportunity for learners to evaluate instructors is a new aspect that generates participation. All questions, documents, training modules, and courses can now be graded at any given moment.
Better yet, online tools allow you to keep track of all exchanges and shared content. Every time something is shared, it enriches and animates the learning community . Everyone learns at their own pace, which generates even more interactivity since it is no longer necessary to ask questions at precisely the right time. You no longer need to worry about students who are too shy to ask questions or voice their opinion during class. Welcome to the world of social learning.
Continual improvement is what allows digital training courses to outperform traditional learning methods . It is important to overcome any reluctance to the idea of incorporating these social and collaborative elements. They empower and engage learners thanks to their own work and posts.
During online training courses, do not be afraid to regularly add questions between work documents and modules. Questions should evaluate key knowledge points from previous document (s) and should vary in format. Multiple choice, true/false, matching, fill-in-the-blanks; different formats activate different intellectual responses and should therefore be diversified. “Open” questions, when learners answer freely, are an important aspect of online training as well. Students feel that they are truly being listened to and engage more with course material when they know a real person will be correcting their answers.
Step 1: Go to the LogyMy and click on the “SIGN UP” button in the top-right corner of the page to get started. Fill in the relevant details.
Beside providing you with an immersive experience and an interactive platform, LOGYMY helps you attract the interested students and learners to your online interactive course. By creating banners, social ads and promoting your interactive courses on social media pages as well as the weekly newsletter.
You can earn a six-figure income if you put in the effort to create, market, and sell your online courses. Furthermore, everything is feasible with an all-in-one online teaching interactive platform that adapts to your learning model and may be branded as your own virtual school .
As the name suggests, it is a form of training in which learners actively participate in the learning process.
An interactive training course is an effective tool for many businesses to increase productivity and the result of employees. Not only provide a good learning structure for learners, but interactivity also give them a place to practice. To make an interactive training course, you need to:
Finally, with interactivity, creators could tap into learners’ emotion. Specifically, learners do not learn only by their intuitive but also by feeling and emotion, especially training courses about soft skills as management skills. As a result, they can understand the situation better and remember the knowledge longer.
From that, placing interactivity elements in the program can provoke the curiosity of learners to find a new thing and the knowledge around the learning topic. Thus, learners could feel more interested and engaging.
When you introduce a new concept or theory for learners, think about how to make learners participate in the lesson realistically and compellingly. In other words, you give your learners a choice, situation or concept to practice a new theory.
Interactive online training videos feature clickable objects and links that make online training more tactile and engaging. They stand out from other forms of multimedia by putting the corporate learner into the driver’s seat. Every viewer gets the opportunity to choose their next move and access online training content that’s relevant to them. Instead of merely watching an online presentation, they are able to pick their own personal path and meet specific learning objectives they need. Here is a step-by-step guide for adding interactive online training videos to your corporate eLearning experience.
In fact, it's best to insert your first interactive element between the 1-to-2 minute mark, and then wait another minute or so until the next hyperlink or hot spot.
The number of interactions you include is based on the length of your online training video. For instance, a 10-minute video should have no more than 4 or 5 interactions.
Without the right eLearning authoring tools, you may not be able to bring your ideas to life. There are a myriad of tools to choose from. Thus, it's essential to narrow down your must-have features in advance. While some offer amazing asset libraries, others specialize in screen recording and video editing.
As the name suggests, interactive training is a form of training, in which learners learn by doing and are, therefore, active participants in the knowledge gaining process rather than passive absorbers of information. Interactive training is not just about sitting back, watching videos or presentations, and clicking the next button. Rather it involves problem-solving, analyzing scenarios and real-life decision-making. With interactive learning, learners gain new knowledge and at the same time, sharpen their critical, analytical and creative skills.
So, basic training courses may include audio, video, text and graphics, and learners participate in activities that require them to click, press hotspots or drag and drop.
Use interactive 360° videos and images to immerse the learners in the course, for instance, you can have videos that walk them through actual locations to familiarize them with the environment in which they will be working or how they would have to perform a particular task.
Kitaboo is a cloud-based platform to create, deliver & track mobile-first interactive training content.
While incorporating videos, make sure they are based on the concept of microlearning. In other words, ensure they are crisp and concise, about 3 to 5 minutes long, so that learners can consume them with ease anytime and anywhere, without experiencing any cognitive overload. Besides, these videos are also ideal for on the job performance support, providing your employees the right information at the right time.
Now that you know how to create interactive training modules, you may still wonder, is it as easy as it sounds? The answer is yes. With accessible technology, you can easily create immersive, engaging and highly interactive training modules that pass control of the learning to the learners. You need a right combination of hardware and software, and of course, a whole lot of creativity to create such courses. However, if you are short on time and wish to focus on your core areas, you may outsource your requirements to eLearning course development companies to create bespoke interactive training modules which can be delivered using a learning management system or a learning experience platform.
Fortunately, developing interactive online training modules has become more manageable with the availability of online tools. In this article, we provide a step-by-step guide to creating interactive training modules. But first let’s look at some interactive training essentials.
Microlearning is an interactive training idea that will help you improve the format and delivery of your lessons. This strategy transforms extensive modules into bite-sized lessons that focus only on key messages. In common self-paced eLearning courses, information is presented through overwhelmingly long modules.
One way to make training fun and interactive is to use gamification. This interactive training idea is the method of transforming regular training modules into casual or competitive games by incorporating game elements into the lessons.
Social learning is an interactive training idea that promotes collaboration among employees in learning certain topics. This strategy allows learners to share knowledge, expertise, and experiences within your organization. You can adopt tools and platforms where your employees can discuss their training lessons.
Interactive reinforcement involves asking a question about information previously covered in the lesson. It reinforces the lesson’s content by forcing learners to recall and revisit what they’ve been previously taught, especially for difficult concepts. A method to create interactive reinforcement is by deploying assignments.
A virtual training simulation is an immersive and interactive training method of engaging learners in virtual activities that are typically demonstrated through in-person demos.
Spaced repetition is a technique where key learning concepts are repeated at regular intervals until knowledge is fully embedded in the long-term memory of your employees. Applying this learning strategy into your training program helps your learners combat the forgetting curve, promote better learning outcomes, and foster knowledge competence.
To keep employees engaged and motivated, you can let your learners earn certificates, incentives, or badges for their learning progress. This is an interactive training idea that gives learners the opportunity to further step up in their training and beat their own progress.
The most obvious examples of interactive training are when there’s a list of questions and tasks after each paragraph in a workbook, or even when an instructor says something like: “Raise your hand if…” The goal is the same: to make learners not only passively absorb information but somehow spur them to action: communicate, reflect, create, or put their new skills into practice.
In the learning field, the term “interaction” is often used in connection with an active learning concept. The idea is that learners learn best when they’re required to participate in the process actively, rather than simply reading a text or watching a video. In other words, it’s always better to have learners do than watch.
The goal of this guide is to make you an expert in eLearning interactivity. So let’s get straight to work, as we have a lot of fun theory about interactive training and even more cool practice ahead.
However, in online courses, well-arranged interactions work exactly for this purpose: keeping learners engaged, their concentration high, and the overall experience positive.
To increase the chances your learners will go with the flow, you need to maintain a subtle balance between the complexity of the training and the abilities of the learners. If the task is too difficult for them, they feel frustrated; if it’s too easy, they quickly get bored, and their minds wander.
If you watch a movie, you’re a passive onlooker (eating popcorn doesn’t count), but if you play a video game, you actively take part in the events.
The good news is that in terms of engagement, well-arranged interactions work equally well, no matter what kind of training you are working on — online, offline, or blended.