It’s time to put on your thinking cap! Today, we’re going to take a look at 6 strategies for using brain power to engage your e-Learners:
- Switch it up!Use a combination of scenarios, quizzes, games, discussion boards, video and audio for your training program. This type of contrast or break stimulates the neural activity in the brain. See how other organizations got creative and used scenarios and games to get their learners engaged: Engage Your Learners with a Zombie e-Learning Scenario and Creating Serious Learning Games with Lectora—A Case Study.
- Give learners a choice.Research shows that choice enhances attention and engagement, so let your learners be in control. You can provide choices throughout the course through scenarios or gamification. This blog post gives some more info on the power of choice to make training fun for learners: How to Make Online Compliance Training More Fun.
- Encourage active retrieval.An assessment like a quiz or test requires active retrieval of information that they’ve just learned. This reinforces what you want learners to remember and embeds it into their long-term memory. Active retrieval also has more long-term benefits for learning than passive studying alone does.
- Do content chunking.Short-term memory has a limit to how many chunks of information your brain can hold at once. Break up information in your e-Learning course into bite-size pieces that are more manageable so that they’re easier to remember. To learn more about content chunking, check out this post: 4 Benefits (and Tips) for Content Chunking.
- Challenge them.People want a challenge, so make sure you’re providing that for your learners in your course. In order for challenge to be an effective mode of engagement, you must make sure that your learners have all the necessary skills to succeed. Find a balance between a course that’s impossible and one that’s so easy that it’s boring.
- Provide feedback.In Teaching with the brain in mind, Eric Jensen explains that our brains are self-referencing. We make decisions based on what our brains have recently done, so provide timely feedback for your students. You can even do this while they’re taking the course! Read this post for great tips on giving feedback to e-Learners: 4 Tips to Give Helpful Feedback to Your e-Learners.
Use these tips to get your learners’ brains engaged in your online training. Plus, check out this roundup of blog posts to help you design training especially for your learners’ brains:
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