In what ways do you give your learner control within an e-Learning course? Is it through navigation, decision-making or something else? Why do you think it’s important to give the learner control? At the 2013 Lectora® User Conference, Matthew Ciocca, from Tier1 Performance Solutions, answered these questions and discussed the importance of learner control through the use of branching.Ciocca explains how using branching in e-Learning courses puts students at the center of their learning—giving them a sense of control and keeping them more engaged. He shared his 5 best ways to use learner control in an e-Learning course. Let’s check them out:
- Give experienced learners more control. Giving experienced learners more control is most successful when they have prior knowledge of the topic being presented. Ciocca suggests presenting a lesson that is advanced in nature, but low in complexity.
- Keep the learner in the learning space. To keep the learner actively engaged in the course, Ciocca suggests not using the next button for navigation, but rather giving the learner choices to select his or her own path.
- Consider using adaptive control. Adaptive control is the process in which learners are “branched” to different instructional materials within a course based on the evaluation of their responses to lesson exercises. For example, if learners answers all questions correctly, they would be branched to a more difficult lesson topic. If they answered only some questions correctly, they would be provided more practice exercises until they were ready to advance.
- Give pace control. Allow learners to navigate through the course or learning scenario at a pace that works for them. This could help stop learners from simply clicking through the course to receive a checkmark for it.
- Implement best practices. Some of these best practices include using titles, headings and introductory statements to organize content in a way that makes sense to the learner, minimal use of links within a course, avoiding the use of course or site maps and utilizing a progress indicator to let learners see how much they have accomplished.
For more e-Learning tips and knowledge from the 2013 Lectora User Conference, subscribe to the Lectora e-Learning Blog or visit Lectora University.
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