We’re engaged! Shopfloor
FOCUS: TRAINING 28
Engagement is extremely important when it comes to staff training, but with e-learning it can be a case of ‘one size fits all’ regardless of your learners’ capabilities and attention spans. Here, Paul Laville, CEO of T21 Group, explains his principles that can be applied to online training to ensure you bring out the best in your employees.
When creating new e-learning courses for our clients, the chief question we ask at T21 is: ‘How do we make it interesting enough for people to want to come back to the modules and finish them?’.
Since COVID accelerated the need for e-learning and more companies are using it to deliver the bulk of their training, this question of engagement is ever more critical. Engagement is an important metric in training delivery because it directly relates to the effectiveness of your course and how widely the information is spread. In a classroom you know when nobody is engaged because they all disappear during lunchbreak. Thankfully that’s never happened to us, but when a trainer senses that attention is starting to drift they can easily change tack, get some interaction going, adjust the pace of their delivery, even the language used, and reconnect to the group. With e-learning it’s a case of ‘one size fits all’ regardless of your learners’ capabilities and attention spans, which creates plenty of engagement challenges for e-learning designers. Today, our e-learning platforms and courses are more sophisticated and effective than ever, but the original ‘principles of engagement’ we drew up to help us create e-learning that people want to start, continue with, and finish, still hold true. Here are five of the best principles:
1. Storytelling
People respond to stories far better than dry facts and numbers. That’s not to say that you ignore those things and don’t include them somewhere in your training, but to be really powerful and memorable they need context. Building a story around facts and numbers in a setting that your learners can relate to – a simple example of this would be a case study – can illustrate their importance and make them memorable.
2. Using video Unfortunately, we see many training videos used to simply drop information, just like the dry facts and figures previously mentioned. But if someone has to re-watch your video countless times to pause and write stuff down, you’ll turn them off. If you really need to provide facts, figures and stats in your e-learning, consider creating a PDF document that your learners can download and print off for themselves. Tell a story in which these have context via the video, but give them the raw information via some other means.
3. Variety
Nobody wants to spend hours watching training videos, or clicking through a glorified PowerPoint, or downloading reams of documents. But if your e-learning uses a variety of media and delivers the right information using the best vehicle for it, it can be far more engaging than just using one of those things start to finish.
4. Gamification
In its simplest form, gamification is about challenge (learn something), play (reinforce what you’ve learned) and reward (get rewarded for your effort). There are many ways to achieve this in e-learning from simply creating an interactive quiz to making an actual game from the training content.
Why? Because it can transform your e-learning from a chore to something more fun, more effective and more engaging. It also incentivises learners to continue; in all our e-learning, points, badges and certificates are gained for completing modules while in some cases points earned are exchanged for actual physical prizes. It’s very powerful!
5. Aunty Mavis and Uncle Bob ‘Aunty Mavis’ is that person in your organisation who is least interested in your e-learning. She doesn’t really care that much about doing it and will make any excuse not to. ‘Uncle Bob’ doesn’t want to take part in the e-learning because he already knows everything. At least he thinks he does. However, if your e-learning can be designed to appeal to both these characters
– if it’s delivered using the right media, using stories that they can relate to, and they feel rewarded for completing it rather than punished for not doing it – your engagement will move much closer to that 100 per cent.
There are many more factors to consider when building effective e-learning, but if you get these principles right, you’ll be a lot closer to gaining the best return on your investment by having an engaged workforce better motivated to improve their skills for both their benefit and yours.
July/August 2022
ertonline.co.uk
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