Making e-learning more fun

E.learning Age, Nov 2006 by Thomas, David

Advertisers are well used to pitching their messages appropriately and use sophisticated analysis tools to achieve this. Learning designers can do the same. For low-involvement information, a message we need to get across but which is not going to transform anyone's life, we need simple games, characters and gimmicks that will make a quick and memorable impact.

By contrast, highly involved learning, such as developing key management skills, aims to create a transformation rather than to impart information and for this we'll probably need to engage with the learner in ways that focus on the intrinsic benefits to them.

This is different again from high-involvement information. For advertisers, an example of this might be buying a new car, which will need high-impact media such as video and graphics backed up by a lot of further information.

From the games industry we can learn the value of having rules, clear goals, outcomes, competition, interaction, representation and storylines that run through a game. What a good game will do is to take you into a state where you're really into its flow and can't put it down. There aren't many e-learning courses that you don't want to put down, except perhaps from a desire to get to the end as soon as possible, but they do exist and have been successful.

Product design is another source of valuable insight into what engages users. However rational we may think we're being as consumers, in reality we all judge products largely in terms of the pleasure we get from them and there are many different kinds of pleasure:

* Sensory pleasure comes from a product that looks, feels, sounds or smells good. Everyone knows the value of coffee and freshly baked bread smells when selling a house.

* Social pleasure comes from products that connect us with other people in new ways. The continuing product development of the mobile phone is a classic example.

* There is psychological pleasure. Quite simply, is a product a pleasure to use?

* Aspirational pleasure comes from having something you would like to have. Cars are an obvious example of this but the sense that by using it you are being the person you aspire to be can be designed into products in subtle ways.

We may be largely unconscious of how the pleasures we get from a product affect what we buy but successful product designers are well aware of this. By asking similar questions we can build rewards into e-learning and quite small improvements in the design and in the look, feel and presentation of a course can make a big difference. If you're designing a course for senior managers, make sure it looks and feels like something that senior managers rather than call centre staff would use.

In the film industries, engagement with the audience is essential, and this applies just as much to factual programmes and documentaries on television as to the latest Hollywood blockbuster.

Film and TV producers often use terms such as "pace" or "the narrative arc" to describe the way they build an ebb and flow into the viewer's experience, and whole academic careers have been built on their analysis. We don't have to go that deep. If a programme simply sets out at a level and trundles on in much the same way until the end, it is unlikely to have either entertained or engaged its audience. There are programmes like that around but there are far more examples in e-learning.