How to create interactive training

Many training and development professionals face this challenge: turning traditional instructor-led training into something engaging and interactive online.

Making an interactive training course is much more than cutting and pasting a Word document into a Storyline project. For best results you must transform the entire learner experience and create a course that is engaging from start to finish.

Don’t know where to start? Here are three key steps to transform passive, reading-oriented content into an enriching learning experience.

Step 1: Evaluate the content with an eye to action

The first step is to find out what you want your students to do once they have completed the course. What actions do you want them to take? Understanding the key knowledge or skills you want to teach will make it easier to identify the essential content you should include, and the content you can leave out.

It is useful to begin by writing formative objectives that place the content within the framework of what learners should be able to do upon completion of the course. From here, you can organize the existing content and activities into blocks that support each of your training objectives.

Step 2: Transform “explain” into “show”.

When you are teaching new knowledge there are some basic fundamentals that students need to know before they start putting what they learn into practice. Instead of giving your students a lot of explanatory text to read, think about how you can make them discover new information on their own.

Here are some examples of what you could do:

• To divide the information in a process of interaction.
• Create an interactive diagram that can be explored step by step.
• Add a narrator to your course who tells a recognizable story.

Step 3: Identify opportunities to add interactivity

Once you have introduced new concepts, think about what you can do to get your students to put them into practice in a realistic and convincing way. This means giving them options, situations and concepts that they can connect to their day-to-day lives.

Branching scenarios are a good option for presenting students with a situation that asks them to choose what to do. Once they have chosen their action, you show them the consequences. For example, you can transform your training content into a conversation where students choose what they would do in that situation and, based on their answers, develop the content.

There are dozens of different approaches to add interactivity to your course. For example, you may want to think about how to include knowledge tests as more than just a course completion check. Quizzes are fun, entertaining and involve the learner, so it is a good idea to make them part of the training practice as well.

Original text: Articulate
Translation and adaptation: Actua Solutions