Making e-learning more fun

E.learning Age, Nov 2006 by Thomas, David

Analysing what makes a film or programme engaging, how the more down-to-earth content is broken up with dramatic moments and how the producer builds variety into the pace and level, can be instructive for anyone engaging with an audience, even an audience of one learner. Designing a course is very different from creating a television programme but, by judiciously varying the mix with video clips, interactivity, games and even tests alongside the bread-and-butter textual content, it is entirely possible to apply the same basic principles. This is something that good teachers have always done with live students, but somehow it hasn't often translated to e-learning.

Relevant themes

According to Reg Agyeman of Tata Interactive Systems it's not good enough to simply put e-learning out there. It needs themes that are relevant and engaging to its particular audience and that does require creativity and careful consideration.

If the learners have seen it all before then they need to be offered something new. It's often useful to consider learning as a narrative rather than as a body of learning points and one of the concepts that Tata has come up with is story-based learning. This breaks the overall learning of a complete course into short, relevant, factually based and memorable stories and it's important that these are real to the audience and related to their situation.

One example of this is the instructor-led training security package developed for British Airways. This is a required course for all staff who work with computers and, while important, its theme is not something the average employee is likely to find particularly exciting. It could have been presented as a single factual course followed by an assessment but it is doubtful how much of that would be retained in the long term.

Instead, the learning points are broken down into a series of six stories, based on real events and characters and set in an office environment that BA staff can identify with as their own workplace. Each story is just three to five minutes long and each makes specific points in a dramatic and memorable way. Staff are free to use the material when they want, and watching the short stories is easy to fit into their working day. Once they've watched all the stories, more than once if they like, there is an assessment and the results indicate a higher rate of retention than for a more traditional course.

We may not be able to make learning fun for all - learning will always require effort - but we can design learning that is serious but enjoyable, and a long way from the all-too-familiar read-and-test model of too much e-learning.

A good example is the company that needed its staff to learn to understand financial statements. This would not be most people's idea of fun, so the learning was embedded in a murder mystery where all the clues were in the financial statements that had to be understood to reveal them. This made a potentially tedious piece of learning far more engaging as it allowed for narrative flow, pace, and something far more fun than compliance to motivate the learners to stick with it.