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The Importance of Incorporating Interactive Learning Elements Into E-Learning Experiences

Published Sat Apr 06 2019

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For educators in both the education and business industries, e-learning has been widely adopted as an effective way to transmit information to learners. For your e-learning courses to be effective, however, you have to do more than just adapt training courses to an e-learning format.

E-learning reaches its true potential only if it leverages interactive elements to help learners understand and engage with the content.

What Is Interactive Learning?

Simply put, the term "interactive learning" is used to characterize courses or training programs that feature elements learners can interact with. This can range from basic animations and training videos that learners take multiple-choice quizzes on, to in-depth, choose-your-own-story style videos, animations, and graphics that take learners on a journey through the content they are learning.

What Does Interactive Learning Look Like?

ProScribe, a major trainer for medical scribes who assist doctors in documenting patient symptoms and treatments, uses interactive content examples in all of their training. Some of their interactive learning procedures look like this:

  • A scribe listens to a medical term, after which they must type that term correctly.

  • A scribe is given a list of medical terms—for example, "hypothermia"—and must then drag the different words that make up those terms (for example, dragging the word "under" to a slot below "hypo," and the word "temperature" to a slot below "thermia") to show that they understand what words those medical terms are comprised of.

  • A scribe is given a jeopardy board, in which medical terms are given values $200, $400, $600, $800, or $1,000. The higher the value, the harder it will be for the scribe to define the term. A scribe clicks on a value, after which a medical term is revealed. When the scribe defines the term correctly (for instance, the scribe is given the term "hypothermia" and types "under temperature" into a box), a celebratory animation plays, and the scribe is then awarded "money" for the term they correctly defined. After they earn a certain amount of "money," they can proceed to the next training module.

  • A scribe watches a video of a patient showing various symptoms and a doctor describing those symptoms. As the video proceeds, the scribe writes down what the doctor is saying. This helps scribes practice what they can expect to be doing on a day-to-day basis within the hospital once they begin working with doctors.

All of these examples are fantastic showcases of interactive e-learning. And if it's good enough to train scribes whose work protects doctors from lawsuits and documents potentially life-changing information about medical conditions, chances are it's good enough for your e-learning experience, too.

Is There Such a Thing As Bad Interactive Learning?

Absolutely! Not every e-learning experience uses interactive learning as well as ProScribe's training courses. Interactive learning can be less than optimal if the:

  • videos in an e-learning course are boring

  • animations have loud, distracting music

  • graphics look outdated or are unappealing.

Learners can actually be negatively impacted by an interactive learning experience. For these reasons, it's important to make sure you either have professional animators, graphic designers, or videographers create your interactive elements for you, or at least consult them before you start creating interactive learning elements yourself.

How Can I Make My Learning Interactive?

By incorporating videos, animations, and graphical elements professionally and effectively into your e-learning courses and LMS, you can create a great experience for both educators and learners alike. This can be done by utilizing in-house resources and expertise, or by tapping into a burgeoning industry of professionals who can create interactive learning videos, graphics, and animations for your courses.

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