Just like a pair of jeans, elearning comes in all shapes and sizes. Once you find a brand, size, and style that feels comfortable, you tend to wear it forever – regardless of where you are going or what you’re doing.
Likewise, when you find an elearning method that works well, you tend to repeat it over and over, regardless of the content. The layout of a typical elearning course will probably be familiar to you.
Your content sits on a series of slides in the center of the screen. Often there’s an outline of your course down the left-hand side (providing a user the comfort of knowing where they’ve been and what’s to come). The ever popular “Next” and “Previous” buttons appear at the bottom right of the training. These buttons let you move forward and back, from slide to slide through the course. View a slide, move to the next, on and on until you get to a quiz at the end. When you pass the quiz, you’ve earned completion. Congratulations! Rinse and repeat.
This type of course is so popular because it simply works. It organizes your content in a logical way and end users can easily understand how to navigate. Like a comfortable pair of jeans, it works for almost everything… almost.
Sometimes it’s refreshing or just plain more appropriate to slip into something different for a night on the town and those old-reliable jeans start to feel tight and mighty stuffy for that stroll along the beach. Don’t be afraid to change things up when it makes sense for the content… or throw on a pair of shorts.
That’s what we had in mind when designing our Winter Driving Safety demo. As elearning creators it’s easy to get in a rut by creating the same courses over and over. What if, instead of the traditional page turning program, we design a way to drive people through our content by simply responding to the interactions on screen? We’re not reinventing the wheel here. Just adjusting the method by which a user moves through the training. In smaller courses especially, opportunities for creative navigation and interactivity tend to be greater. Less content means the user doesn’t necessarily have to be presented with all the options of a larger course (think traditional lists of content topics and objectives). They can simply interact, learn and get through the training in a short period of time with minimum fuss and maximum fun.
In our short, Winter Driving Safety demo (shown above) we set out to create a simple course (sometimes called microlearning) that has no traditional “Next” and “Previous” buttons, no content outline, and no final quiz. The sole purpose was to allow users to learn quickly. We tried to create attractive graphics, animation and interactions that would capture interest long enough to get users through the content and memorable enough to be effective training. Three simple categories are presented to the user, each of these is a single learning interaction and can be accessed in any order. When a category is completed it’s clearly marked as complete. Simple but effective training.
Hopefully, you’ll view this demo as an idea starter for your own training. Think about breaking up your content into digestible pieces and consider new ways to make your training memorable and effective. And while you’re at it, try on a new pair of pants. Now, let’s talk about that shirt…