4 Common ELearning Interactions

By: Justin Ferriman • December 5, 2016
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woman-with-finger-gogglesOne thing that people like about an elearning course is when it contains various interaction points. This keeps the learner engaged and thinking about the content in different ways.

Without interactions the entire experience is boring and arguably ineffective.

If it is your responsibility to create elearning on a particular subject you should look for ways to incorporate interaction points. The good news is that this is pretty easy to do. What’s more, you don’t need to go overboard to make an impact. Some simple and subtle interactions are all you need.

Wondering what kind of interactions you can use? Here are some of the more common ones as originally detailed by Atomi Systems:

Using Characters

Animated characters can carry out conversations with your learners, give advice, and guide them through the content. Having a consistent character throughout the course as the guide adds to the structure of a course while also creating an element that the learner can relate to.

If you have multiple characters make sure that you define the distinct role each character plays in the course narrative. One may be a guide, another a protagonist, and perhaps server antagonists. Keep these roles consistent throughout.

Gamification

This has been a hot-topic item for a few years now and with good reason: it works. Using points, badges, high-scores, leaderboards, and similar systems in your course thrusts the learner into the content while tapping into people’s innate desire to “win”.

Scenarios

These kind of interactions are more complex in nature in that they pose a multiple-probable-outcome situation to learners and request a contemplative response to the scenario. Often times ‘branching’ is a tactic coupled with scenarios which gives the learner the ability to make free choices.

Hot Spots

Very simple to implement, these kind of interactions usually require the learner to hover their mouse over certain areas of the screen to reveal more information. It’s a subtle tool that can be used to keep forward-momentum in the course.

Justin Ferriman

Justin started LearnDash, the WordPress LMS trusted by Fortune 500 companies, major universities, training organizations, and entrepreneurs worldwide. He is currently founder & CEO of GapScout. Justin’s Homepage | GapScout | Twitter