In eLearning, interaction is one of the most important elements. However, people mostly forget and neglect the role of this component in their course. For this reason, learners rarely have an opportunity to connect with their instructors. Therefore, besides design and content, you should put interaction into your checklist before making a course.

Interaction, as its name, give content a chance to interact with receivers. As a result, your lessons become more lively and attractive. So, how to create a good eLearning interaction in your course? Therefore, here are some powerful tips to help you add meaningful interactions into your eLearning course.

Benefits of interactions in eLearning

It is undeniable that good interactions can raise up learners’ interest in learning. In particular, creating interactions is creating an opportunity for audiences to communicate with the content of your eLearning course.

To maintain the attention of learners, creators should come up and generate many valid interactions for their course. Specifically, the more meaningful interactions your content offer, the more receivers are interested in your course. Furthermore, having great interactivity shows that your content brings much of relevant information for learners. However, too many interactions can easily distract learners. Therefore, how to add meaningful interactions not only to capture learners’ attention but also to maintain their learning objectives? In the next part, we will show you an easy-to-follow guide to create more interactions in the eLearning course.

Take a look to deeply understand why interactions is important in an effective eLearning course:
» What do you need to develop a successful eLearning course?

5 ways to add meaningful eLearning interactions

1. Encourage exploration

Learning is exploring. But, how to provoke learners finding out more about your eLearning course? Here is some useful way to stimulate your learners exploring.

A. Let learners explore in any order they want 

In traditional linear eLearning approach, students have a tendency to follow a learning map that teachers draw up. To be more specific, instructors guide learners thought every single step of their course. However, people who love exploring and enjoying the new things and new knowledge won’t be satisfied with this teaching method. 

Therefore, to keep learners enthusiastic, you should unlock your navigation of your eLearning first. In detail, it is better to let learners actively pick what they want to learn. Instead of step-by-step learning, learners can choose the topic due to their preference and explore the welcoming environment in their own way. As a result, receivers will feel more engaged with your course than trapped in a strictly structured environment. 

B. Let them explore hierarchical knowledge

As an instructor, you should guide your learners to go through all stages of knowledge. In other words, you slowly stir up their curiosity by showing them the most general information about your course. By using an interactive diagram in course, learners can have the most overall understanding of what they are about to do. Besides, this way also avoids learners from having no idea what they are received after finishing one session.

However, don’t show learners everything from the beginning. To illustrate, your course is just like a movie. You won’t tell your audience a whole story from the start. Or else, nobody will watch it. So, you show them each episode. And, with a little twist or promising at the end of your lesson, you can bring up their excitement for the next one. As a result, you can motivate your learners to explore more about your course.

2. Social elements

Nowadays, social media is such a helpful tool for both learners and instructors. In fact, people mostly share their ideas, opinions, and knowledge through different social platforms. Specifically, learners could bring the content back to their homepage. Then, their family, friends, and acquaintances on the internet can come to comment and discuss. For this reason, learners can be able to use your content to interact more with the external environment.

Additionally, if your content is good enough, it potentially goes viral on social. In particular, people will keep sharing and spreading your content everywhere on the Internet. Thus, it can save a gazillion dollars for branding and promoting your eLearning course.  

3. Questions

To increase the interaction of your eLearning course, you should keep connecting with learners by asking some simple questions. To be more specific, you can raise up some questions such as “What do you think about this content?”. Or, asking them some situation one like “How would you solve this?”. By doing this, learners will feel more involved in your lesson.

Besides, answering these questions can create an opportunity for learners to evaluate their knowledge after learning a long course. Every time that learners get the wrong answers, they can obtain a valuable lesson for themselves. In the end, they will remember the information more and avoid making a mistake twice.

HubSpot is one example. After finishing a topic, they normally ask learners five to ten questions. And, these questions are related to what they have mentioned in the lessons. This way, students can revise what they have learned and found out what they are neglect. Then, they could come back to that topic and review it.

4. Problem-solving

Asking learners to solve problems related to their experience can increase the effectiveness of your eLearning course. Indeed, you can come up with some situations which are related to their job or their interest. In particular, placing your audience into real-life problem-solving is a practical way of learning. Then, instead of telling right or wrong, you explain more about all options for them. This way will give your learners ownership for their decisions. And, at the same time, you can offer them relevant and constructive feedback. 

Furthermore, you can add some flavors into your course by pulling up some familiar characters or environment. Hence, this way not only help your course appealing to learners but also let them solve their real-life problems. Bar Model is one example. Specifically, they successfully made Math funnier and more relevant to kids by adding Avengers’ characters into their lesson. Indeed, Avengers is familiar with children and they will have more attempt to solve problems. 

5. Interactive learning environment 

Building an interactive eLearning environment for learners is one of the most important factors. However, what is the key points that you have to notice when making one? Here is a checklist to help you creating eLearning interactions’ environment.

A. Keeping the size of the group small

To increase the effectiveness of the eLearning course, you should keep the size of your learning group relatively small. So, how can you do that? The most helpful way that you can do is putting a time limit on course registration. 

Nowadays, lots of people follow the personalized learning method. Indeed, creators could provide content which is unique and tailor-made for every learner. As a result, you are able to control and track your learners’ progress. And, it is easier for you to interact with learners and answer their request when they need.

B. Providing a community for learners

One of the best learning experiences is sharing and discussing. With this way, learners can not only revise their knowledge but also absorb some external opinions. To make that happen, instructors create some communities and group for learners. In the era of technology, there are many options for you to choose such as your own eLearning platform or Facebook and Linkedin Groups. 

Through these groups, you can provide some activities related to your course. For example, a forum for students to chat and discuss with each other about the lessons. Or maybe, it can be a place for you to give learners some extra materials and answer questions from them. Above all, the effectiveness of learning is going to be higher after the course.

C. Being presented and responsive

First and foremost, to push interaction and provide motivation for learners, instructors should be represented. For example, add talking – head video or the voice-over in animation to enhance the teacher’s presence in your eLearning course. By doing this, learners will feel like interact with their instructors directly. Therefore, they appreciate when receiving special care from teachers. 

In contrast, they will contact you and ask whenever they have a concern or problem. Therefore, try to be responsive and active as much as you can. Sometimes, just a timely reply from the support center can let the learners feel supported and satisfied rather than waiting 2 days for a direct answer from the instructors.

Conclusion

To sum up, interaction is an important factor in eLearning. Besides content and design, interaction is a helpful tool which can improve students’ attention and increase the effectiveness of the course. In this article, we provide you five tips to add some meaningful interactions communicating into your eLearning course. Hopefully, you can understand more about the role of interactions in eLearning, and then be able to create and add one into your course.

Read Further:

• How to write learning objectives for online learning courses effectively
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• Combine talking-head videos and animated videos for better learning outcomes