What does it really mean to create an engaging learning environment and learning activities? After all, most educators would probably say they set out with the intention of creating learning experiences that engage. However, anyone who has taught for any real length of time will tell you that in some years even the most finely crafted learning content just lands better than others.

The reason, of course, is that there’s no one-size-fits-all trick to engage every audience. Therefore, when we talk about designing for engagement, we start by thinking about the audience — and we routinely find ourselves with multiple audiences. The differences between them can be subtle or substantial. In my own context, I’m regularly adjusting for the difference between, say, administrators and learning designers. For other educators it could be the difference between children and adult learners. Perhaps even in the same class.

And then, knowing your audience isn’t just knowing their age and their background, but also understanding the circumstances in which they’re learning. We also need a good idea of the amount of time your audience can commit to learning, the devices they have access to, and the restrictions that internet connectivity imposes, among other variables.

 

Meeting Audiences Halfway With Clear Expectations, Objectives and Course Organisation

Understanding your learners’ situations, the reasons for their choice of learning environment and how their needs change through the course of their days, weeks and months, will allow you to better pitch your learning. However, understanding your audience is only half the battle — they have to understand you, and specifically what you want them to get out of the learning.

We can fully engage when we know what to expect. This clarity often comes from within the team creating the content — so it’s critical to be clear about who’s responsible for what and set clear objectives within our projects. This makes it far easier to communicate our expectations to the student, such as the time you expect a task will take and what you expect they will learn. Expectations work both ways. You should also be communicating things like the pace at which you will grade work and when you’re going to be available.

Course organisation is another important avenue. Consistency across your courses — including using templates as a starting point for the learning materials you construct — can help you shape expectations about how material works and where information can be found.

Regardless of whether templating is involved, it’s important to pay attention to page navigation, drawing the learner’s eye to the right places and meeting their expectations of how everything behaves. These principles can be supplemented by tools such as user tours, guiding learners — especially first-timers or learners who have to deal with the idiosyncrasies of a variety of LMS's — to key areas of the overarching navigation through a simple automated tutorial. Navigation within the activity is also important. There must be a logical path to follow that leads learners toward the key learning objectives.

 

The Importance of a Range of Interactive Approaches

When we build interactivity into our courses, they’re engaging by default. We make the learner an active participant in constructing knowledge and promote critical thinking. This is done in parallel with increasing motivation, participation, knowledge retention and overall investment in the topic.

Open LMS is a big fan of H5P, the free and open-source content collaboration framework that allows us to build a wide range of interactive content into our learning.

However, we also like to build in interaction in other ways — we’re fans of BigBlueButton with highly effective interactive whiteboard and polling features that we love to integrate into lessons. Tools like this give our learners the opportunity to interact with others in unexpected ways. They highlight that full interactivity isn’t the only valid approach — short bursts of interactivity can revitalise the room and keep engagement high.

 

Start small

Indeed, just because you have all the tools at your fingertips doesn’t mean you have to use all of them at once. We always encourage educators to start small and focus on integrating some of the interactive content types they already use into their materials and assessments. These could include video, text, images, quizzes, etc.

We also like to combat the assumption that interactivity is exclusive to synchronous work — being live is cool, but having time to digest and create has its advantages!

When we build in certain types of interactivity, the learner feels like their opinion, thoughts and feedback matter. Another thing I like to do is to take a temperature check. Every three to four weeks in a course, I ask a single question, usually something simple like “Did you find this week’s lesson useful?”, “Do you feel you absorbed what you needed to learn?” or “Was this interesting for you?”

 

Sprinkles stick

Even if you’re not face-to-face or even synchronous with your learners, these small moments of interactivity help them to better engage with you because they recognise you’re a person who cares about their learning. They also help you collect crucial feedback.

The little activities you sprinkle into your courses along the way may seem relatively low stakes, but they can also stick in the minds of your learners in ways that other material may not. This can pay dividends beyond the little engagement boost they offer in the moment: you could consider collecting them together as a supplementary way to practice and revisit the material.

 

Final Thoughts

While engaging learners and building engaging learning are related concepts, they’re not the same thing. There are many ways you can engage your people: reaching out to them, talking to them, introducing yourself via a welcome letter. Building engaging learning requires us to think about clear course organisation. Setting clear objectives and outcomes, communicating what they can expect of us, and whether we’re giving them options to interact. By knowing our audiences, we can build learning environments that people want to come to — and come back to!

 

Amy Tessitore 

Adoption and Education Specialist at Open LMS