Three Steps to Incorporate More Visual Content into Your eLearning

Creating effective eLearning is really challenging. How do you fit inall the content you need without massively impacting running time? How do youmake sure your learners actually come away with knowledge that sticks? How doyou make sure they’re not clicking with one hand and scrolling through Twitterwith the other?

It’s all about engagement: Once you’ve grabbed the attention of youruser, you need to sustain it throughout the module. But that’s easier said thandone. Some people will suggest adding a narrative track, or maybe restrictingthe navigation. It sounds like good advice, but actually, it contradicts somekey behaviors of learners:

• You can’t read andlisten at the same time. You literally can’t. The part of your brain thatprocesses written text also processes narrative, so even if you tried reallyhard, at best you’d only be flitting from one stream to another, unable to giveeither your full attention. It’s like when your brain feels like it’s had aworkout, but you haven’t really got anything to show from it.
• Restricting yourlearners in some cases works against you. The learner feels like you don’t trust themto do the module properly, so they immediately become disengaged.

But the good news is that there is a solution, and it only takes threesteps.

Step 1: Cut down your text

If you can’t read and listen at the same time, choose one stream.There’s nothing to say you can’t use both to keep your learners interested, buttry to keep it consistent: You might have all your new information deliveredthrough narration, and all your breakout interactive content as written text—orvice versa.

Whether you use written text or narration, try to be really focusedabout the information you’re providing and ask yourself, “Is this point relevantto my learning objectives?” If it isn’t, then consider putting it in a “clickfor more information” layer or in an appendix.

And if you absolutely must have paragraphs of text on the page, thenbold or highlight the important words to guide the learner to the key areas offocus.

Step 2: Use visuals

An easy way to reduce the amount of text you have is to turn your textinto visuals. Think about someone in the office approaching you and asking youabout a process—something like the water cycle, or the sales funnel. Iguarantee the most natural way to explain a process like this is by grabbing apiece of paper and sketching it out.

Visuals are so helpful in those situations. Why? Well, it comes back towhat we were saying before about the sides of our brain that processinformation. If one side deals with written or aural information, the otherside processes visuals. So when you have visuals that accompany text ornarrative, the message arrives at your brain through two complementary streams,helping it to stick a bit better.

And visuals needn’t be complicated to create. You just need to knowwhat you’re looking for in your information. Read more about the process we use here. 

Step 3: Pace the flow ofinformation

If you’re anything like me, you remember stories much better thandisembodied facts. That’s because, as humans, we love stories. A compellingbeginning; oh! what a twist in the middle; and man, we all live for thatending. Using stories—however simple—throughout learning content will help yourlearner latch on to facts and how they link together.

But when you give away the beginning, middle, and end of your story allon one page, your learner drowns in a sea of information. Structuring it into astory is therefore key, and animation is the means for telling that storyeffectively.

Animation needn’t be complicated, either. Even just bringing things onusing simple fades paces the flow of information for the learner, giving thembits of the story in manageable bites. If you’re using PowerPoint to createyour eLearning, you might be interested in some animation tips to give your content the edge.