Tips ‘n’ tricks section – Lars Egidius Helle, creative director, Mohive
At Mohive’s annual user group in Oslo mid June I had the pleasure of conducting a workshop on the theme of interactivity. This newsletter piece is about my thoughts and reflections after the event and from developing our most recent whitepaper on interactivity released July 1st, ready for download at our website.
Be warned, today’s topic is a repetition from previous newsletter pieces, but since interactivity is, to us, the essential essence that constitutes quality in e-learning, bear with me for becoming evangelical.
when creating bespoke e-learning, any interaction adds to the cost. In contradiction, utilizing Mohive, interactivity may be cheaper than static pages because they are more condensed.
I once had a discussion with an e-learning consultant who had a spreadsheet for helping his customers budget their e-learning. Each page had a factor: Factor one for pure text pages and up to factor 12 for “advanced” functionality such as exploreable illustrations. (Similar to pages made with Mohive’s explore or iexplore flexi templates)
This is why, via internal production in Mohive, your e-learning efforts can be better than any outsourced bespoke production. This is because when making bespoke, any interaction adds to the cost. In contradiction, utilizing Mohive, interactivity may be cheaper than static pages because they are more condensed.
So how should you enter this hyper interactive nirvana?
Here are two quick tips:
- Kill your content: Remember that content is the worst enemy of good e-learning. Always start out by agreeing your learning objectives before deciding on the content for the course. In other words: Do not rush through the planning/concept phase in your project.
- Never fire up Word or PowerPoint: Writing e-learning with these evil twins actually implies that interactivity is something that should be added in afterwards. The danger of this approach is that it just increases the length of your program, without increasing the quality of the engagement between the content and the learner.
For example: if you were creating a course on the company’s values, a classic approach would be to state what the company’s values are and then ask the learner a control question.
Contrastingly, an interactive style would be to write from the beginning in an interactive sense. For example; the author would assume that the learner has some preconceived understanding of the company’s values and therefore present the learner with a situation that requires a choice to be made connected to that perception. The author would then use the feedback feature provided in the e-learning solution to give the learner insights into the consequences/outcomes of making that choice.
If you have any comments about this, please e-mail them to me and I will be happy to answer, either directly or in this newsletter.