In this video/blog, we’ll examine five tips that will help you to gain attention at the start of a video eLearning course.
You can read the blog or view the video below. Both have the same content.
The first stage as per Gagne’s Nine Events of Instructions is to Gain Learner attention. Doing this effectively will help you to ensure that your audience gets hooked to the training right from the beginning. In traditional interactive eLearning or instructor-led courses, it is easier to gain attention with the help of interactive activities or instructor-led classroom discussions, or games. However, as Instructional Designers, we are developing a significant amount of training as videos. So, it can get challenging to think of effective strategies for gaining audience attention at the start of the video course.
So, here are five tips that will help you to engage your learners from the start of your eLearning training videos.
Tip 1: Start with a Challenge or Problem that the Training will Solve for your learners.
Anyone attending training is doing so for solving a problem or challenge that they are facing. So, the first thing that you should start your course with is identifying the problem for them and then presenting how the training can help them solve the problems. As a result, the learners will get engaged as they will understand that the training has a problem-solving design, which will help them to overcome their challenges.
Tip 2: Include relevant character or illustrative animations, or animated whiteboards.
As humans, we enjoy watching stories, hence a lot of us are movie buffs. Thus, including animations, such as character or whiteboard animations can help us to engage learners. In the past era, making animations required specialists to use complex software, such as Adobe Animate or Flash. However, in recent times, a significant number of animation software, such as Doodly, Toonly, Animaker, and Biteable have become popular. These solutions help you to easily make different styles of animations without involving graphic design specialists. So, consider subscribing to a software solution that will let you make engaging animations and thus level up the engagement with your training.
Tip 3: Use a clean graphic representing the big picture of the training.
In case animations are not relevant for your training, you can consider starting your course with a process diagram or any visual diagram that represents the flow of your course. Presenting the flow of the course visually instead of listing out the chapter titles will help your audience treat your presentation as a story. The visual presentation will help them to identify the different topics and how they are linked.
Tip 4: Keep the content and the messaging of your writing extremely relevant.
Your animations or cool graphics will not serve their purpose if they are not relevant. It is important to ensure the way you write your content is relevant to your audience. So, keep your writing clear and with relevant information. Avoid any redundancy in your writing.
Tip 5: Write effective, relevant, and measurable objectives.
Finally, along with the attention-grabbing strategy, present learners with, measurable objectives that inform learners about what they will learn in the course. We recommend using Bloom’s taxonomy to write your objectives as it’s the most popular strategy and tool used to write learning objectives.
We hope these tips help you make more effective starts to your course videos. To learn more about Instructional Design, do check out our course, A Practical Approach to Instructional Design on Udemy.
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