As you know, interactivity refers to any type of strategy that invites the student to interact with the content. With this approach, the student is no longer passive, dedicating themselves solely to receiving information, but instead they become active participants getting involved in their own education. Interactivity helps content to have a greater impact on students and, therefore, reinforces their learning.
Benefits
Interactivity provides the student with a series of significant benefits:
- Content becomes more pedagogical, more motivating and more intuitive by taking full advantage of the visual resources that new technologies allow us.
- The student becomes the protagonist of their own learning, as they interact freely with the content and resources of the platform. This way, the student feels more involved and committed to learning.
- The learning process gets reinforced through multiple tasks: it is no longer just about reading information, but also about comparing, practicing, deciding…
- By being more interactive, a course can offer the student instructional feedback, in order to confirm their success or correct their mistakes.
All of these strategies allow you to create content that is more experiential, whereby the students put themselves to the test. For example, have you ever thought about turning your content on its head? Presenting a thought provoking question first, prior to giving any explanations, and then providing background theory through the answer. This will surprise your students and make them think about their existing knowledge while predisposing them to learn in a more positive way.
How to include interactions in your e-learning course?
Until very recently, including interactions in an e-learning course would involve additional costs to the instructional design programming. However, authoring tools like IsEazy help you fulfil your requirements without any major difficulties or technical knowledge. Below, you will find some of the options available in order to interact with your students through the courses you prepare with IsEazy:
- Cards allow you to put content on both sides so you can find out new information when you turn them over. These are an ideal resource, for example, for question-answer or cause-consequence content.
- With a gallery you can explain a process step by step or you can present a series of images with related text, allowing the student to move backward and forward freely and at their own pace.
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- Points of interest or hot spots let you highlight certain parts of an image or can be used to offer additional information. With active elements, there is no limit to the creativity with which to provide extra pieces of information to our students.
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- Linked images allow you to navigate through several levels of information (images plus text), that are all linked to one another, allowing the student to navigate and investigate freely.
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Tip: If you wanted, you could build a big decision tree where the students themselves are at the very heart of the decisions. They themselves would then create their own learning path by moving around the content that interests them the most, instantly learning from their successes and mistakes by being in charge of their own decision-making. Can you think of anything more interactive than this?
… - Lastly, activities that help the students to know how well they are assimilating the material. For this, IsEazy has exercises that you can place wherever you wish in your course, from multiple choice questions to the grouping of concepts:
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IsEazy also has final assessments, which can be set with a minimum score in order to pass the course:
It is very important not to overuse interactive elements when preparing your courses. Remember that every action the student makes (a click, for example) must be followed by a reward in the form of information. If you overuse interactions, you run the risk of making the training program too long and distracting your students from the essentials of the course, that is to say, its content. Therefore, you must choose carefully which content you want to make interactive and which ones to present with other types of resources.
Have you already tried interactions in your courses? What were the results?
Happy e-learning!
