One of the biggest challenges in e-Learning is creating a course that encourages participant interaction. Without some sort of engagement, it becomes too easy for participants to surf the internet, answer email, or just plain not pay attention. So how do you create engagement?

The easiest (and most obvious way) is to require interaction with the module in order for the lesson to progress. This can take many forms, from the simple “click next to continue” button, to a specific question designed to quickly test if the participant understood the concepts at hand. Naturally these will help the ultimate goal of employee engagement to some extent, but it shouldn’t be the only strategy used.

If you are training on a new software program, then you have a great opportunity to create e-Learning with user interaction specifically designed to reinforce knowledge acquisition. Using your favorite e-Learning development tool, do a screen capture of a specific task within the software being trained to. Once the task is complete, open up the editing program and begin inserting interaction components to the entire (or part of) the recording.

So, instead of participants watching a recording of how to do something in , they are required to click on the various menus and type content in the text fields. This moves the content from the “show it” arena and into “try it”. This strategy is also beneficial because it limits the participants’ ability to just blindly progress through the course.

Every step of the simulation doesn’t need to be interactive, you can simply interject some throughout the recording. Doing this indirectly forces the participant to pay attention to each step as they do not know when their involvement will again be necessary.  The added benefit of these interactive components is that it allows participants to practice interacting with the software outside of the production version.

There are various ways to improve the likelihood knowledge acquisition by creating interaction in e-Learning. Interjecting required questions and simulations throughout training are just two strategies to help take your e-Learning modules to the next level for your organization, ultimately lending itself to improving employee performance.