More often than not, interactivity and engagement are the primary ways of making training more effective, engaging, and memorable. While that statement may not be an earth-shattering revelation, the secret to executing the strategy successfully can be elusive when it comes to the kind of process and behavioral changes you want to introduce with your training.
Like with any training strategy, there are effective ways to incorporate interactivity into your training and there are less effective ways. So we’re going to hit on both in order to offer a deeper understanding of how to make it work for you.
Interactivity for interactivity’s sake is not effective.
To start, interactivity, when used in relation to instructional design and training in general, relates to the involvement of the learners with the material and the learning process. There are multiple levels to this participation, with training interactivity ranging from passive to highly involved.
Passive training would be exemplified by a page turner where learners just click “next,” or in the case of gated/locked training, distractedly look at their phone or check email until the audio stops, and then press “next.” The learners are interacting, but they are not engaged with the training, which is essentially just washing over them as they endure the time being taken out of their day.
An example of highly involved interactivity might be where learners are asked by the trainer to raise their hands whenever the name of a training exercise has the same first letter as the state in which they were born. While this is technically interactive and may encourage learners to pay more attention to the training, it does nothing to help them gain a better grasp of the material because the use of interactivity is not engaging or relevant to the course content.
Engagement is a key element in any interactivity effort.
Well-developed interactivity will naturally breed engagement, but that doesn’t mean the engagement element can be an afterthought. An instructional designer needs to create that engagement from the start, and then maintain it throughout the course.
Engaging learners from the get-go can be a tricky proposition and one for which I think we, as a collective whole, need to learn from the best—marketers. Instructional designer and author Cathy Moore wrote an excellent article highlighting three ideas employed by marketing that are often overlooked in the instructional design world:
- Assume the learner is smart. Don’t lead them by the nose or talk down to them; instead, allow them to connect the dots and draw conclusions for themselves.
- Establish a personality (other than “dry”) for your training. And instead of just name-dropping faceless positions, like “Line Cook 5,” give them a name and personality, too.
- Keep things interesting with surprises.
To illustrate these three points, Moore shows us a commercial for Dollar Shave Club, and then takes that same content, removes all of the sizzle, and inserts it into your typical training page-turner. When you remove the personality and assumption of learner intelligence, the content becomes much less engaging.
While advertising and training are different animals, the same principles apply when it comes to engagement. After all, both training and advertising are modeled to inspire others to action. So these three points apply to the whole of training, and even in those cases where learners are not directly interacting (as with the Dollar Shave Club commercial), they are learning.
Three smart ways are available to bring interactivity into your training.
To really get the most from interactivity, it can’t be something you design into your program as an afterthought. It should be incorporated from the beginning. That said, there is one easy way to incorporate interactivity into an already designed training program to demonstrate interactivity’s ability to make training more effective.
Adult learning theory (and general common sense) indicates that when learners care about the material and are engaged with it, they are more likely to learn. So a simple debrief after training is a perfectly valid means of employing interactivity. It gives the designer the chance to get more learner insight into training for additional fine-tuning in the future, as well as giving learners an opportunity to progress to a deeper understanding of the material by talking with colleagues. Both the instructional designer and the learners come out ahead in this interaction.
The other two methods are more complex ways to incorporate interactivity:
- Bringing gaming elements into training is a hot topic these days for a reason—done well, it works on all levels. It’s engaging. It aids memorability. It’s fun, so people want to learn. And, ideally, it’s relevant to the learning content. There are two main approaches to consider: a structural application where content is unchanged, but learners earn points or badges as they progress through the content. And a content application where the difficulty level gradually increases as learners move through the content.
- Scenarios. One of the most compelling elements of any interactive training is a scenario incorporating consequences. You can use mini-scenarios where you make a decision, see the consequence of that decision, and then figure out if you made a good choice. This approach works for many instances, but not when you want to effect deeper change. For that, choose a branching approach where one decision leads to another decision, then another, and so on before you come to your consequence. Along the way, you can include branches that lead back to good decisions if learners are recognizing that they have started down the wrong path. This approach should echo the real-life choices and consequences a learner would face in the workplace.
It is a commonly held misconception that a high-tech solution is required to achieve interactivity, but that’s not always the case. Gamification may require some bells and whistles, depending on how you design it, but the scenario-based approach and the debrief do not. One of the most important things to incorporate into any interactive, engaging training intervention requires no technology at all—relevance. Make your interactive and engaging elements relevant to the training you’re trying to impart and you’re almost guaranteed success.
Create your effective, engaging, and interactive training with purpose.
The effective use of interactivity requires forethought and planning. Just “adding interactivity” as a series of mouse clicks isn’t enough. Useful interactivity encourages learner engagement with the material, is translatable to the skills they are supposed to be learning, and supports the absorption of those skills.
Likewise, making learning engaging goes beyond just adding elements of fun. The fun must be relevant to the learning content in order to build a sense of mastery and achievement. As Moore says, “Successfully making increasingly difficult choices in a realistic scenario is far more likely to build a sense of mastery. Building mastery provides the real fun…we should…design challenging, realistic activities that give people a sense of accomplishment.”
There are countless ways to incorporate interactivity and engagement into your training; some are more effective than others depending on the situation. What’s important is integrating interactivity in such a way that feels natural and furthers learner knowledge absorption. As you move forward with training, always ask yourself what’s the simplest and most effective approach. Don’t build just to build. Create with purpose.
Download our whitepaper, “Using Interactivity and Engagement Effectively in Gamification and Scenario-Based Training” for a more in-depth look at this topic.