Have you ever watched The Magic School Bus? What about Bill Nye the Science Guy or Schoolhouse Rock?

These entertaining children's television programs have an important common approach to education: they explain complex subject matter in easy-to-understand ways by using likeable characters in fun narratives.

The childlike wonder you experienced when learning chemistry from Bill Nye can happen in the modern classroom. Regardless of whether your content focuses on technical training or soft skills, incorporating characters into appropriate learning modules can positively impact both learner engagement and retention.

eLearning has been a viable training option for a while now. Thanks to tools like GoAnimate and Camtasia, instructional designers can quickly and easily produce a high-quality learning product. But just because we have access to technical tools, that doesn’t automatically result in a seamless creation process.

As expert Jennifer Hofmann points out:

“Instructional design is still relevant to blended learning. It’s evolving, and it’s mission-critical.”

As a helpful component in many blends, we need to thoughtfully plan out our eLearning modules and connect them to defined learning objectives.

But how?

Virtually There Session Recap

Pixar animator Andrew Stanton said, “The greatest story commandment is: make me care.” Some of the most creative storytelling minds use this mantra when illustrating to increase audience engagement with their films.

Unsurprisingly, this approach can apply in modern learning, as well. How do we get our learners to care about our training programs?

Learning Strategist, Enzo Silva, and his colleague Kate Tronvig provided Virtually There learners with an easy-to-follow process during their popular session, “You May Not Be Walt Disney, But You Can Draw and Animate.”

Watch their session for tips and tricks around using popular eLearning design tools.

Virtually There Session Recap

“Build an eLearning course,” they say. “It’s what you’re great at! You can have it done by Friday.” Sound familiar? eLearning’s popularity as both stand alone instruction and part of a larger blend makes it a standard in many instructional design portfolios. Unfortunately, the “go do that thing you do” mentality reflects a general misunderstanding of the complicated nature of eLearning production.

When faced with such a disconnect, how do we design impactful modules with a limited budget and an overwhelming number of tools available for purchase?

Kevin Thorn, Chief Nuggethead and corporate training expert, provided a helpful framework for building an eLearning design, development, and production toolkit consisting of free and paid tools.

You’ve put the finishing touches on the script for your client. Your company has just spent thousands of dollars creating the perfect visuals, countless hours perfecting the story, and you’ve even decided on some cool background music.

It all looks fantastic, should be a huge success. Right? Now, all you need to do is have somebody voice these modules.

Who? How about Mary or Joe in Accounting – (such a nice voice)?

Those who suggest that eLearning and instructional design are dead or dying must have a different view of eLearning than the millions of people who leverage it daily. Instructional design and eLearning are here to stay, evidenced by the sheer numbers of online learning opportunities available to the individual with a laptop, tablet, or smartphone.

What is eLearning?

To have a true discussion about eLearning, it helps to define the term. Elearning is learning that takes place through electronic devices outside of a brick-and-mortar classroom. Due to the portability of devices like smart phones and tablets, eLearning can take place anywhere there is access to the internet.

One of the primary goals in online learning is promoting active recall in students. Summarizing subject matter into a useful context is one of the keys to information recall. ELearners should be invited to express lessons in their own words for better comprehension and retention.

Active and Passive

Two different approaches are typically used to instill learning objectives:

• Passive recall involves learners reading textual recaps or listening to summaries in the form of lectures. This serves as a reinforcement of covered material in order to promote memorization.
• Active recall links information to problems that stimulate the brain to provide answers. Focusing on the practical value of the information is a more effective way to establish it in long-term memory than passive repetition with no real-world context.

Here are some of the ways you can increase active recall in your eLearning projects.