9 Ways to Incorporate Interactivity Into Your eLearning Course

Just a few years ago, eLearning was a daunting task that often required students to complete boring coursework. Interactivity simply didn’t exist. Thankfully, today things have changed quite a bit. Students can look forward to courses that are genuinely engaging.

From the content creator perspective, interactivity is one of the critical keys to ensuring the effectiveness of courses.

In this article, we’ll take a closer look at interactivity, including its benefits and nine different ways you can incorporate it into your eLearning course.

What Is Interactivity?

Whether students are consuming content by reading or watching, the vast majority tend to be static. However, with interactivity, the content being delivered is engaging and actively encouraging.

Without noticing it, the average consumer engages with interactive content on a regular basis, including content delivered by prominent names like Netflix and Buzzfeed.

Benefits of Adding Interactivity to eLearning

The sense of achievement in learners can be enhanced through interactivity. Additionally, the quality of an eLearning course can be defined by the degree of interactivity it exhibits. Here you can find additional benefits of adding interactivity to eLearning.

Build Motivation

To encourage students to participate more willingly in eLearning courses, interactivity can add fun elements like different themes or music. Adding engaging media can help motivate a student to continue with the course. There is a direct correlation between motivation and interest, which means interactivity can help motivate students in the eLearning environment.

Improve Knowledge Retention

Curiosity is bred through interactive activities, which promotes active knowledge acquisition. However, it’s important that knowledge is retained and stored in our brain’s long term memory. This can be done by incorporating strategies to improve knowledge retention, such as:

• Multimedia

• Scenario-based case studies

• Recognition

• Awards

Engage All Learners

It’s no secret that creating a compelling story is much more powerful than reading plain text. When you create eLearning courses that are interactive, you are able to create immersive learning environments that tell a powerful story and that students can actively contribute to uncovering. The students become absorbed in the content in this type of advanced learner-centered environment. Higher engagement means a student is more likely to complete a course and utilize the teachings in their own life!

Encourage the Learning Process

The place where past experience and knowledge blend with the new is the reflection step of the learning process. After completing an eLearning course, the desired outcome for students is reflection. Interactive content encourages reflection in students, which ultimately requires them to take charge of their learning process.

Entertain Your Learners

Last but not least, it comes as no surprise that interactive eLearning content is more entertaining. Students can relate to the content in eLearning, which helps them to make real-life decisions without having to worry about real-time risks.

9 Ways to Use Interactivity Within a Course

Now that you have a better understanding of how interactivity can add to your eLearning courses, it’s time to learn how to integrate it.

Maps

Maps can be linked back to traditional in-person classroom learning. Think of how students can learn geography without the use of maps. Now, imagine how you can take this learning to the next level.

Creating interactive maps can help expand the way students grasp the information on the screen without being overwhelming.

Games

Personalized learning and gamification are yet another prime examples of how to make historically boring course content come to life instantaneously. Who doesn’t want to learn through playing games?

Virtual Reality/Augmented Reality

Virtual reality is the future of eLearning, and for a good reason. Integrating VR in eLearning courses breaks the mold of any traditional forms of learning for the better. Students can be immersed in an entirely simulated environment where they can more thoroughly engage with course concepts.

VR provides students with the opportunity to virtually visit places and periods of time that they might not have experienced before and to actively engage with concepts in a new way.

Timelines

Timelines are overwhelmingly linear. While having the visual can be incredibly helpful in eLearning content, you can use interactivity to boost the engagement of this tool. Something as simple as allowing students to click around a timeline helps limit the amount of information on a page at once, avoiding overstimulation and instead promoting retention.

Surveys or Polls

Surveys and polls differ from traditional quizzes because it allows students to see their results compared to the other poll takers. By providing this instant feedback to students, you’re immediately allowing them to gain a better sense of how their preferences and opinions compare to their colleagues.

Sliders

Visual learners rely heavily on images to absorb content. Consider adding image sliders to your eLearning course to impact visual learners and a broader demographic.

Especially when used to compare two (or more) images, sliders can have a huge impact on grasping a concept. For example, imagine trying to teach the impact of polar ice caps melting by having an image slider of sea levels in one area from today and 25 years ago.

Calculators

The basic calculator may not necessarily be something that comes to mind when it comes to eLearning content, but it should. Think of some of the interactive calculators available online today, such as mortgage calculators or interest rate calculators. These interactive calculators are engaging and valuable to those using them. Consider areas of your eLearning courses in which calculators could be integrated.

Videos

The early stages of online learning used videos to help create more meaningful content. Today, we have the ability to create interactive videos that prove to be even more valuable than their more linear predecessors.

Infographics

One of the most effective ways to display data in a more aesthetically pleasing fashion is through the use of infographics. Today, in eLearning, we can take it to the next level with interactive infographics.

Quizzes

Although quizzes may seem like a more traditional approach to learning, it’s important to consider interactive quizzes to step up eLearning. For example, providing students with instant feedback or results on how they’ve performed on quizzes allows them to back and reference the materials more closely.

Final Thoughts

The larger role of interactivity is that it presents us with nearly limitless benefits for expanding our reach as educators. After all, studies continuously show that content that is engaging is more likely to be retained by students long-term.

As we continue to propel forward into the future of eLearning and develop its content, ryco.io is continuously researching different aspects of interactivity as we work to integrate this technology into all of our courses. Stay tuned for all of the upcoming exciting things we have in store!