Are your eLearning courses typically linear? Is your narration read verbatim? Do your courses look like presentations rather than eLearning? Do you struggle with ways to keep your learners engaged in asynchronous environments? If you answered yes to any of these questions, you’re not alone. Frequently presented with wordy content, eLearning designers need to provide online solutions under tight deadlines. These constraints often lead to finished products that lack learner engagement. But adding simple animated visual components to illustrate key concepts and organizing content into a non-linear architecture can drive learner engagement and enhance knowledge transfer and retention.

In 2009, WellPoint eLearning designers implemented a standardized process that encourages transforming eLearning from linear, “page turner” presentations to engaging, non-linear activities that support knowledge transfer and retention. A large focus of this process is to include images and animations that illustrate content, allowing learners to make meaningful connections with the information. This visual approach to content has led to learner satisfaction and engagement scores that exceed industry best-in-class benchmarks. Participants in this session will explore how WellPoint’s eLearning designers used this process to organize content into non-linear (exploratory) architectures, employ creative techniques to encourage thinking in pictures, make deliberate animation decisions to bring “thought pictures” to life on the screen, and apply standardized animation guidelines in course creation.

In this session, you will learn:

  • How to organize non-linear content
  • How to use animations to bring thoughts to life on the screen
  • How to apply animation guidelines

Handout(s)

Recording