By just listening, an adult learner can concentrate for only about 20 minutes on average. As a result, it’s even harder to encourage them involved in the training of dull-and-dry topics like company compliance. So, how to encourage them to take a more active role during the session? The key answer for you is an interactive online training program.
Now we’ll get to the bottom of an interactive training program so that you can maximize its power. Let’s start with the essentials.
What is Interactive Training?
Interactive training involves active learner participation and a two-way flow of actions. Instead of just listening to lectures or watching videos, learners communicate, create, reflect, or practice. To achieve effective training, learners must be deeply involved and fully concentrated.
According to Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s Flow theory, instructors must balance the training’s complexity with the learners’ abilities. If the topic is too challenging, learners can become frustrated; if it’s too easy, they might get bored. The goal is to keep learners at the edge of their skills to ensure engagement and effectiveness.
So, how to make training videos for employees effectively? Make them interactive!
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How to Make Interactive Training Modules: 4 Creative Ideas
So now we get the theory. The next question is how to make online training interactive in practice. Well, if you talk to training video production companies, you have plenty of options. Here we recommend including the following effective modules in your next interactive online training program:
- Branching scenarios
- Frequent quizzes
- Simulations
- Gamification techniques
#1 – Branching scenarios
While upskilling training is essential, its theoretical nature often makes it boring and impractical for employees. To address this, branching scenarios can be effective. This approach requires learners to make decisions that influence the direction of the training narrative.
If a situation goes wrong, instructors provide additional information to help learners understand why and guide them in correcting it. Those who perform well can explore more advanced content, making the training more engaging and applicable.
In this way, the difficulty level of each challenge will vary depending on each learner’s performance and abilities. That‘s why practicing with branching scenarios is suitable for training personal skills like analytical situations, critical thinking, or decision-making. They can feel like joining an adventure game with different outcome abilities to explore.
Additionally, to explain the situation in detail and lively, consider using animation videos with motion graphics. For instance, let’s see how F.Learning uses animated video to illustrate the medical-related situation from iHEED.
Mastering the branching scenario method means sharpening the storytelling skills, you can read it here.
#2 – Frequent quizzes
In passive teaching, learners merely listen to an instructor and take a small test at the end. In contrast, interactive training incorporates quizzes as recurrent checkpoints after each section to reinforce learning. You can also use them as opening activities to assess prior knowledge of upcoming topics, ensuring continuous engagement and active participation.
Regarding quiz types, do not just stick to the original form of ask and answer. There are various more exciting types to choose such as multiple-choice, sequence, true/false, fill-in-the-blank, drag-and-drop, etc. Use more than one type when necessary to create a diverse experience and avoid repetition.
To give you an idea, let’s see some of F.Learning’s animated videos for interactive online training that uses quizzes. The following instructor leads learners through quizzes of drag-and-drop:
NOTE:
To have good quizzes for interactive training, you should scan your training materials and pick the most important content.
#3- Simulations
As for the lack of in-person practices, another interactive activity for online skilling courses is simulation. With simulation, learners can put knowledge in a certain context that they might deal with in real life. To maximize the effectiveness, they should be highly relevant case studies to their work.
Take a look at the below example – an internal communication animation using interactive. The instructor puts learners into a real-life situation of how to deal with a grease fire and gives them a true/false question:
In business corporate training, negotiation, or customer service skills are the most obvious pieces of training that implement simulation modules. The situation can be a contract negotiation with a hard-to-get partner. Or it can be a phone call by an angry customer where employees are required to immediately suggest a solution.
#4 – Gamification techniques
Most employees find traditional training courses monotonous and boring. However, an interactive training program with gamification can re-engage them by structuring the course as a fun, competitive experience.
Gamification involves incorporating gaming elements into a non-game training environment. For example, maintaining a scoreboard and rewarding top performers with badges or certificates encourages learners to complete tasks for higher scores.
Take a look at the below examples, instead of giving learners a long and boring text to explain the object, we encourage learners to click on each object and actively learn about them:
Those techniques aim at keeping employees enjoying the training, which can motivate them to perform better. `
Domino’s Pizza, for example, has successfully introduced onboarding online training with a gamification experiment. In the course named Pizza Maker, new employees will compete in pizza-making simulations within the shortest time. As a result, they have decreased significant training time so that new employees can be ready for work quickly.
Benefits of Interactive Online Training Modules
A non-intrusive learning environment
The training coming with interactive modules allows learners to perform spontaneously and non-intrusively. That learning environment always gets learners’ attention and makes them focus on the assessment. For example, learners need to continuously complete and review their tasks until reaching a successful outcome.
Real-life Perspectives
Simulations or branching scenarios activities help learners to experience real-life difficult situations right in the training. They can learn by trial and error without the cost of loss of clients, revenue, and reputation. Such a risk-free environment for employees to practice and master their skills
Self-learning
In an active process of interactive training, learners have an opportunity to explore and proceed with the training at their own pace. It provides learners with various options to make learning a continuous experience, which plays an important role in forming self-learning habits.
Why F. Learning Studio Should be Your Choice for Interactive Online Training
Now you know how to create interactive online training to captivate your learners from beginning to end. To support you in this endeavor, F. Learning is here to help. Whether you’re a beginner or an experienced trainer, we have tailored services to meet your needs.
We have a lot of experience in turning text into interactive materials, such as animation, hotspots, hover images, and more. All of these captivating elements are customized to match your learner profile. This approach speeds up knowledge absorption and evokes emotions, creating memorable learning experiences.
Besides that, our team has the technical expertise to create a wide range of interactive elements. Plus, we can seamlessly support uploading these elements to your preferred learning management system (LMS). So share your struggle with us, and we can take on your burden.
Final thoughts
Interactive online training is undoubtedly the future of online training as it encourages the highest learners’ engagement to improve learning efficiency. We believe the article has equipped you with the full approach to interactive training Hope you find some hands-on ways to build its program helpful in your future work.
Any other problems in creating your interactive training program? Do not hesitate to share with F.Leaning for a consultation. We love to support you with our experiences!
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Read further:
- How to remain brand consistent in employee training programs
- How a business writes training objectives effectively
- how to repurpose training online materials for microlearning
Sean Bui, the founder and creative director of F.Learning Studio, is a respected leader in the e-learning and multimedia production industry. With over 10 years of experience, he has dedicated his career to helping organizations create engaging and impactful learning experiences.
Under his leadership, F.Learning Studio has grown into a trusted partner for organizations in the education, healthcare, and corporate training sectors, producing over 2,000 minutes of educational animation.
