The biggest challenge that teachers and parents face in online classes? Undoubtedly, it’s dealing with the constantly falling attention of learners and engaging them through the learning session. Online learning is the most serious issue since there is no human touch involved, and you can’t even see the learners’ reactions in person. So, what is being done to ease this problem? Interactivity is the best bet to ease the problem.

An immersive course allows learners to engage with content at different touch points and has a high chance of engaging them well. It motivates them to critical thinking, problem-solving, and helps to activate their long-term memory. This may also go a long way to helping them retain and apply knowledge after the course. Games, scenarios, simulations, quizzes, and videos are some of the most essential elements of such interactive learning modules. Expanding on each of these below:

1. Games

Games are an exceptional aid for learning. They bring a sense of fun to learning and motivate learners to perform better without even realizing it. Games let learners explore, try to fail, try again, and learn. Players are looking for risks, challenges, rewards, and recognition when they play a game. There are different game mechanics that can be applied to these games in order to fulfill the above-mentioned human motivations. Examples of a regular crossword can be a hit with online learners.

2. Quizzes and Assessments

Quizzes and tests offer an incentive for learners to fail in guessing, which in turn increases the consistency of their learning. Quizzes are a great medium to test students’ knowledge, measure their performance, provide feedback and reinforce key concepts.

3. Scenarios

Scenarios are used to recreate a real-life situation that a learner might face and expect the learner to make his own decisions and make progress through them. They aim to promote in-depth learning and to make learners aware of the different opportunities they will have and need to respond to in a given situation. Learners become aware and sensitive to the complexities of each path they choose.

Goal-driven immersive learning scenarios, fact-based scenes, and branching questions are some interesting formats you could deploy for building engaging digital scenarios.

4. Simulations

Simulation promotes the idea of learning through doing so. They can emulate real-time applications or real-life processes so that learners can practice in a risk-free environment. Simulations are useful when you need to walk a learner through a critical concept, process, or procedure.

Role-based or process-based simulations, explorative simulations with picture, text, and video, and screen-component-based simulations are the most preferred types of interactive digital simulations.

5. Videos

Videos are the de-facto standard of communication today. If a picture speaks a thousand words, a video definitely speaks a million. Videos have the power to turn passive content into an active experience for viewers and tend to engage learners faster compared to any other media.

Interactive videos take this experience a notch higher as they are designed to transform the traditional video experience from a monologue into a dialog. These videos can be personalized, are capable of providing skip navigation, informative overlays, and quizzes, and feature engaging user interactions.

Interactive learning is based on the premise that the learner interacts with the content to progress in the course and achieve the desired objectives. At the base of it all, there could be several reasons why you want them to interact. You might want them to move from one piece of information to another. Or you want them to collect some information and make decisions. You might want them to have a hands-on experience with a process or activity. Or you want to give them an opportunity to explore. Once you understand why they need to interact with the course content, you will better understand what kind of interactive element(s) to include in your course. Once you decide on the kind of interactivity to be included in the course, you could build it using either the traditional skill-based approach or by using a rapid interactivity builder.