The magic of cinema is timeless. The whiff of salt and buttered popcorn in the air, the bubbling soft drink as you prepare for your journey into another reality, these are some of the experiences we can never quite replicate in our living rooms.

Apart from hundreds of hours of entertainment, the movie experience also provides an example of how to make our e-learning courses stand out.

“Munch” Time

Munching on snacks while watching a movie enhances the whole viewing experience. No trip to a movie theatre is complete without the regular dose of popcorn and candy. This extra bit of sensory input helps stimulate our brain and becomes an inseparable and important part of the movie watching experience.

Apply a thing or two from the snacking experience at the movies to the e-learning courses you create.

People need sensory input for our brain to develop and function properly. Our brains develop, learn and operate optimally in multisensory environments. Suppose an adult individual wishes to identify bird species. What would be a good stimulus to encourage learning in this case? What would be the best training protocol?

The focus is how to improve the learner’s perceptual skills and the aim is to enable the learner to recognize and discriminate between varieties of birds. We can hypothesize that this learning can successfully happen through training with pictures or video clips of the bird types with the name of the species.

Now wouldn’t this learning be more effective if the training included recorded birdcalls? Most likely ‘yes’ because bird songs are another feature (or auditory-visual stimulus) that can be used to distinguish the different species.

So when creating e-learning training, a multisensory-training environment can help produce greater and more efficient learning. Sometimes a simple stimulus, such as music or a game can drive things forward without overwhelming the learner.

Connect with your Audience

People have different tastes, sensibilities, and preferences. The training you create needs to be a pleasant experience for the learner.

You can accomplish this by connecting with the target audience. Know your learners! Different fields of work are exposed to different jargon and concepts. A construction worker is going to expect different lingo than a sales person, so even if there is overlap in the learning content, the treatment needs to be different to create an impactful experience for these two diametrically opposed audiences.

160 minutes and counting…

The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey was the first movie from the Hobbit trilogy. It cruised to a billion dollars in a few months; however, the common complaint audiences had was about the length of the movie. It seemed excessively long for a slender story, and if 160 plus minutes was not enough, there were two more movies to go.

Don’t overstay your welcome when making an e-learning course. Have a clear objective in mind. Ensure the sequence of information in training follows a natural and comfortable progression. Don’t leave your learners guessing when they’ll finish. Know when and how to end the training.

Make it Worthwhile

For some people, no movie is a bad movie, but for others, movies need to make sense.  The common characteristics of a bad movie are a cliché plot, recycled formulas, a bad twist ending, and so on. We are far from entertained or happy at the end of a bad movie experience and the high-ticket prices just add insult to injury.

So if you are creating something, create something good. Ensure the e-learning course is worth your learner’s time and helps the learning process, rather than hindering it.

From the Sets of E-Learning – Lights, Camera, Action!

There are many ingredients to a great e-learning course, but in the end, the success of your course depends on one question, “Did the course help the audience learn and apply relevant skills and knowledge?“

Here are certain pointers that will help you build better and more effective courses:

• Provide relevant stimuli to heighten learner’s attention and interest. To gain their attention, use tricks like animation, relevant graphics, interactions, or storytelling.
• Show and explain why the course is relevant to the learner. It is best to make it clear up front, and please remember, “Because your job calls for it” doesn’t count!
• Create a well-structured course. Your audience will feel more confident about completing the course if they can envision the overall structure of the piece.
• Develop a visually appealing course. It could be a simple HTML treatment based on the principles of good graphic design, or an elaborate scripted video with high-level animation, if you design carefully, a bit of visual diversity can go a long way in motivating learners to complete the course.

Create an engaging course that you can be proud of! Don’t limit yourself to the predictable screens of text and bullet points. With some creativity, you will be able to construct powerful pieces of information that motivates learning.

Put on your director’s cap, raise the curtain and bring the screen leaping to life! Happy creating!