Digital HR Managers all notice that passive learning is no longer effective in modern corporate learning. By just listening, an adult learner can concentrate for only about 20 minutes on average. However, it’s also hard to get 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 most essentials.
What is interactive training?
Interaction means a two-way flow of actions that each affects the other one. In the training field, “interactive training” refers to the concept of active training. As the name suggests, it is a form of training in which learners actively participate in the learning process.
Rather than just listening to the lectures, reading slides, or watching videos, learners need to communicate, create, reflect, or practice to complete the training. In other words, you have to encourage them to “do some things”.
So, how to make training videos for employees effectively? Make them interactive!
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Theory of the Flow
To gain an excellent training result, we need to be so involved in the learning and totally concentrate. Or according to the Flow theory of the psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, we must be in the flow of learning. It requires the instructors to maintain a subtle balance between the training’s complexity and the abilities of learners.
What does this exactly mean? If the topic is too heavy and hard, learners can feel frustrated and overwhelmed. If it’s too easy, they might get bored and their minds will start wandering.
The matter is that we need a condition that keeps learners at the edge of their skills. Only when they concentrate on the lectures will the learning become engaging.
And what we are finding here is an interactive training program.
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Ideas to form an interactive online training program
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.
Interactive is one of the most creative ideas for virtual employee engagement. Here we recommend including the following effective modules in your next interactive online training program
- Branching scenarios
- Frequent quizzes
- Simulations
- Gamification techniques
Interactive training ideas #1 – Branching scenarios
There is no doubt that upskilling training is necessary. Unfortunately, that it’s just theoretical makes many employees always find it boring and not sensible. How to help them out to put those skill training into practice?
In this circumstance, branching scenarios work. This approach requires learners to decide how the situations will go by choosing from various options available. The narrative of the story will change differently in consequence.
When the situation is going wrong, instructors give learners more additional information to find out the reason. And then let them continue to choose how to fix it. On the other hand, learners who manage to do well can explore additional advanced content.
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.
Interactive online training ideas #2 – Frequent quizzes
Imagine that an instructor talks about the topics throughout the session and then ends it with a small test. That is how passive teaching makes a learner become just a listener.
In an interactive training program, we will not just set quizzes or tests as the final activity. Instead, we utilize quizzes as recurrent checkpoints after each section to continuously keep learners recalling what they have learned. Besides, we can also use quizzes as an opening activity to check learners for knowledge of upcoming topics.
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. Using more than one type when necessary to create a diverse experience and avoid repetition.
To give you an idea, let’s see some F.Learning’s animated videos for interactive online training that use 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.
Interactive training element #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 give 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.
Ideas for Interactive training program #4 – Gamification techniques
Almost all employees do not want to take serious and specified training courses. Those training sessions are quite monotonous and boring.
An interactive training program with gamification can help training departments to get employees’ attention back to the course. Structure the course as a healthy competition that learners need to achieve their target in a fun and engaging manner.
Gamification does not mean playing games in the course. Gamification takes in gaming elements in a non-game training environment. In particular, you can maintain a scoreboard with names of the best-performing employees. The best performer then gains a badge or certificate as a reward. In this way, learners will want to complete all tasks for a higher score.
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 the 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 various options to make learning a continuous experience, which plays an important role in forming self-learning habits.
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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