What Makes eLearning Interactions Effective?

All those who are associated with content creation for eLearning would appreciate that eLearning content springs to life through instructionally designed activities and interactions. A static, non-interactive, or thoughtlessly interactive course usually results in a disinterested, non-motivated, and even cynical learner. Examples abound. The reason probably lies in synchronizing instructional design knowledge with an understanding of technology’s capability to implement instructional ideas. None can survive without the other! But then, if the reason is so clear, why don’t we remedy the situation?

The answer could be - the approach that Indian eLearning industry follows is primarily reactive. When our client asks us to create more interesting and interactive courseware, we begin our quest for ActionScript programmers and when our client asks us to create instructionally sound courses; we wake up to the need of recruiting instructional designers. Most often than not, we fail to connect the two. We fail to analyze the underlying fact that it is the ID-programmer teams that can deliver a course that is instructionally sound, interesting, and effectively interactive. Interactivity for the sake of interactivity leads us nowhere; nor does instruction if it doesn’t account for the delivery tools and medium.

The following discussion will outline the differences between effective and interactive, and then provide an insight into the balance between interactivity and effectiveness. It will also sketch the method that instructional designers can follow to arrive at appropriate, effective, and “enough” interactivity in an eLearning course.

To begin with let us review why we, as instructional designers, exist. I think we exist for making learning effective. To achieve this end, we need to answer the following questions:

1. Who is the audience?
2. What the audience wishes to learn from our course?
3. What is medium of delivery?
4. What are the tools that will be used to develop the content for the specific delivery medium?

The answers to these questions depend on one another. For example, the medium of delivery should be determined after carefully considering the target audience and the content. An example will help clarify the point. An audience comprising the city children who wish to learn how to play guitar, will respond better to an instructor-led training; while an international audience comprising teenagers who wish to learn about the Old Kingdom in Egypt will probably respond better to a well-researched, hyper linked online course.

Yet, when it comes to creating eLearning interactions we would have definite answers to the above four questions before we begin creation. Let us see how these factors impact our interactive activities and exercises.

1. Who is the Audience?
Knowing the audience is of course a pre-requisite for creation of a good course. After all, the audience shall decide whether the course was useful or not. Following pointers are helpful while determining the type of interactives you may have.

• Is your audience comfortable with computers?
The answer to this question will differ based on the current levels of computer literacy and usage in the country to which the target audience belongs. This information has to be tempered with the profession/educational level information to arrive at a useful conclusion. For example, the youth of rural India are not very comfortable with computers and Internet, while the urban Indian youth thrive on it.

If the answer to this question is “yes”, you can be creative with the types of interactions you may wish to add. You may think of small games and add user driven physical simulations to your course. If not, it will be safer to stick to the traditional MCQs, MMCQs, and FIBs. Since these types of questions have prevailed in the traditional educational system for a long time, the not-so-savvy computer user will be comfortable with them.

• What is the lifestyle of your audience?
This question will lead to answers that will help you determine what kind of interactions would suit your audience. For example, there is a higher chance that if the audience has sedentary life-style; the games that enthuse her or him are of the cerebral variety. They would probably be drawn more towards crosswords and other kinds of puzzles while those who involve themselves with more physical sports would find it difficult to be tied down to computers for longer durations. The activities that you design for this audience should be shorter and provide immediate feedback. This is just an example of how the lifestyle of our audience impacts the activities that we design for our course.

• What is the gender of your audience?
If you are creating courses that are more likely to be taken by one gender than another, you should create your activities in light of the gender of your audience. The fairer sex could be more inclined towards story-based puzzlers, and the stronger sex could probably be more interested in activities that come directly to the point.

• Which age group does your audience fall into?
On the learning-entertainment continuum, the kid audience prefers to be at the entertainment end. The better you wrap education in entertainment, the higher are your chances for attaining success. The teenagers would like to learn from content that is presented through activities that allow them to apply their understanding. Older audience prefers to formulate their own opinion on every matter. Think of activities that help learners do what they love to do.

Most often, the demographic information is easy to find; it’s the corresponding instruction driving information that needs to be dug out. One way to begin this treasure hunt is to find out about the current popular culture. Find out which magazines, movies, novels, and cultural icons dominate the present cultural scenario of the region that our audience belongs to.

2. What the audience wishes to learn from our course?
The next question that we should try to find answer to is “What the audience wishes to learn from our course?” By the time we reach the stage of writing eLearning interactions for our courses, we’ve already answered this question through the terminal objective of the course. The course objective is reached through a series of competencies (skills that the learner needs to develop in order to meet the major objective of the course) also called the enabling objectives.

All instructional designers know that each of these competencies is written to help the learner achieve a certain level of skill. While designing activities against each competency, review its Bloom’s Level. For example, if a competency has to be developed in the learner at BL4, the learning activity that you design should be at analysis level. Think in terms of case studies, slice-of-(office)life (yes!) stories, where the learner can use the learned concepts to isolate issues by pulling the case apart.

The main job of course activities and exercises is “to elicit learning” and “provide feedback” (Gagne’s Nine Events of Learning). This means that your content’s effectiveness is determined by the kind of activities you create. If you need to teach a competency at application level and you create an exercise that reinforces the competency only at comprehension level, you have not helped the learner achieve his or her aim.

3. The Delivery Media:
In addition to the audience and the content, the instructional designer also needs to determine whether the activities map to the medium of delivery. As I mentioned earlier, none of the factors that we are discussing here can be considered in isolation. They connect to one another in more ways than one.

• Access to Content:
For example, when you create content for the online medium, you should carefully consider the issues that the learner may face while accessing the content. Streaming videos could be a great option for creating video-based activities in the west, but for not for the Indian market. In many states of India, Internet access remains a problem area.

• Control Over the Outcome:
While creating an activity always remember that you should have some tool to control the learner’s behavior. If you create a field activity for your online audience, you should have some way to measure whether the learner has attempted the exercise or not. If the course is facilitator-driven then the learner can be asked to submit a report, which will tell the facilitator whether the learner has completed the activity. In absence of such feedback mechanism, such an exercise will be useless.

4. What are the tools that will be used to develop the content for the specific delivery medium?
Finally, while creating interactions for eLearning, you need to keep in mind the content creation tools and the capability of the tool to implement the interaction visualized by you. Following are the technological factors that should be weighed while writing eLearning interactions.

• How much of the Interactivity is Instructional?
Interactivity built to entertain but not to educate leads to wasted effort. Let me explain this statement further. The primary reason for the existence of interactivity is to engage the learner for imparting learning. If the learner stays engaged but doesn’t receive learning that is commensurate to the effort that creation of corresponding interactivity has led to, the effort is wasted. The reason why it is wasted effort is simply that the objective of the course was not met. While visualizing interactive content, the instructional designer should review each activity and exercise to determine whether the level of interactivity is justified.

• Can I create value for the learner through simple interactions?
If you can, you are a good instructional designer. By value, I don’t just mean instructional value, but also the interest value. I once came across a wonderful piece of eLearning content, which seemed to have its graphics drawn by a 5-year old, and interactivity was conspicuous by its absence! Yet, it was probably the most engaging content that I ever browsed through. The instructional designer for the course (just like most of us) remained unnamed but he or she managed to create value for the learner!

• Interactions should not be canned!
Yet they often are. Most interactions are implemented in more or less the same way…most interactions are built around lower level competencies (or lower levels of high level competencies.) It is assumed that eLearning interactions cannot be taken to higher levels but they can, and they should be…depending on the level of the competency addressed through them.

• Interactions should be efficient!
When you visualize eLearning interactions always think of the time that the programmer will spend programming them. If eLearning interactions are designed keeping in mind the instructional design principles, even simple interactions have the potential to become interesting. It is a good idea to learn a bit about Flash and Photoshop, two software packages that dominate the elearning industry.

I think that if the instructional designers, project managers, programmers, and graphic designers of today, realize the need to understand other disciplines, and decide to break the glass walls of their respective practices; we will be able to create more useful and effective content for the next generation of human race.

Author: Shafali R. Anand