The Elearning Guild recently produced 68 Tips for eCampus Engagement & Interactivity as a collection of suggestions for getting users to become and stay engaged. Elearning Guild is heavily focused on corporate training but I’m happy to say that the strategies they promote are based on sound educational theroy. The report was broken into these sections:
Eighteen Tips for Creating Engaging Content
Ten Tips for Creating an Engaging Interface
Three Tips for Using Interactivities to Drive Engagement
Twenty-five Tips for Using Media and Visual Design Effectively
Eight Tips for Using Games for Learning
Four Tips for Measuring Engagement and Learning
From these 68 tips, these are the tips that I found most interesting:
- clicking the “Next’ button is not enough; students need interactions that convey and reinforce information
- give them something to be curious about
- narrative flow
- finding the connection between the different points of information
- why this information matters and how it is relevant to them.
- often it’s the examples and anecdotes that the SME doesn’t include in the slide deck that make the content come alive
- people tend to remember information and experiences that trigger an emotional response. To make your learning modules memorable, use humor to engage the audience. Select audio and visual examples that play to a range of emotions.
- ask the learners how this content relates to their own work, whether they’ve done something like this before, or how it makes them feel. Ask them how they’re doing on this skill right now, and perhaps give them a
- self-rating scale to complete. By getting learners to stop and think, you help them internalize the content and make it their own.
- we pay more attention to onscreen pictures of people when they are looking right into our eyes
- live virtual sessions, build in a variety of interactivities every two to three minutes and be sure to monitor how many people are participating
Tips viewed in Wordle format:
Four authors stood out for me but I was only able to find a web presence for one of them:
Cammy Bean Blog: https://cammybean.kineo.com/
Amy Leis
Amy jokinen
Susan O’Connell
