e-Learning is More Effective When It’s Fun!

 

How You Can Easily Make E-learning Fun

effective e-learning is fun

At Teamings, we are always looking for ways to make remote meetings and e-learning sessions more productive. We know the results of an e-learning session far outweigh the meeting technology products and tools you use to do the training. Today, we review the benefits of making training fun and highlight a few tangible ways you can make your e-courses more fun and effective.

It’s no secret that when people have fun, they are more motivated to learn, this holds true both in the classroom and in an e-learning environment. What is fun? Fun involves enjoyment, amusement or lighthearted pleasure. Fun can be easily incorporated into live training sessions with physical activities, icebreakers, games, puzzles, and group projects. This type of fun can sometimes be difficult to transfer to e-learning situations.

Why make your e-learning sessions fun?

  1. Fun activities release the chemical dopamine in your students’ brains. The presence of dopamine is central to learning. Simply put, when a brain has fun, dopamine is released and the brain’s Limbic system takes note so it can remember how to replicate that positive experience. If the brain is bored, dopamine depletes and the negative encounter makes the brain want to avoid whatever led to that depletion of dopamine. Thus, the release of dopamine helps with memory and learning motivation. If you bore your students, they won’t remember jack.
  2. When people have a positive experience, their level of attentiveness increases. This holds true for your students as well.
  3. Fun lowers stress and stress affects memory negatively. If a student is experiencing stress at the time of your e-learning course, – maybe they feel like they ‘don’t have enough time for this nonsense’, their boss just scolded them or maybe e-courses just stress them out- their brain is being inundated with various stress hormones that wreak havoc on the hippocampus and prefrontal cortex. By helping to reduce stress with fun, you’ll help them remember your content.
  4. Fun also lowers various mental barriers. People having fun are more likely to accept new ideas, adapt to new ways of thinking and/or change their behavior. In the video below, you’ll learn that 66% more people than normal chose the stairs over the escalator just because the stairs played music like a piano when they were stepped on.

The #1 tip for making e-learning fun

Make sure your fun activity is related to your e-course’s content or message. Fun can easily turn from a learning tool to a distraction if it is not well integrated into and relevant to your e-learning course.

Tips of the trade

Humorous Speech

Humor is probably the most common and easily implemented tactic for creating a fun e-course. Humor really makes content memorable and grabs your students’ attention. It can turn the most boring of topics into a side splitting experience. A little humorous self-deprecation can go a long way to make people feel comfortable- just don’t take it too far. Take Southwest Airlines’ treatment of the boring compliance requirements of airline safety for an example. If this video of a SWA flight attendant’s safety speech can get 16 million views on YouTube, you can make your compliance speeches fun too!

Funny Videos

Another way to add humor to your e-courses is to show humorous videos. Marketing and ad campaigns make great source materials. Advertisers are experts in teaching and changing behavior in short, entertaining snippets. TV and movie clips work as well. You can get inspiration from these videos and create your own or simply show the ad as an introduction to your learning module. The key is to make sure they are short! In general, you wouldn’t want to use a video over 3 minutes long. 1 to 2 minutes is best.

Here are a few you might actually be able to use (if they relate to your e-course’s topic, of course).

Teamwork Illustration – Together, everyone achieves more.

Bad Customer Service Illustrations

SEINFELD Car Rental Clip – Customer service has to be genuine. Customers don’t react well to ‘faked’ service.

Target and Walmart get called out with over a million views on YouTube. – In the digital age, you don’t want your bad customer service showcased for millions to see.

Communication Illustration

Non Effective Communication Video Clip – Word choice, tone, clarity and timeliness all factor into effective communication.


Time Management

Dilbert: Time Management – There’s not really a message here. It’s just short, funny and a great way to introduce the topic.


Marketing

Sh*t Marketers Say: This is just a short and fun intro to the world of marketing. ‘Stuff ______ Say’ boomed in 2012 and tons of these videos are on YouTube. You could probably use this format to bring fun to any course topic. The only problem is that most are ‘Sh*t’ and not ‘Stuff’- not very professional! The good news is that these types of videos are very easy to make. You might even be able to pull off your own version just by using your smartphone.


Gamification

Gamification is the newest trend in e-learning. It is a great way to add fun to an e-course, albeit an expensive one. Gamification works best when it challenges students and shows them the consequences of their actions. So you’d want a game with a narrative and some complex problem solving. Good gamification usually takes special programming and graphic design, so you’d have to talk to the professionals. Here is a good resource to learn more.

If you have Adobe Connect virtual classroom, you can easily create fun, simple games. Check out the video below.

Old Fashioned Games

One benefit of in-person training is the ability to employ various games and physical activities to illustrate a point and provide a bit of fun – and to do so without a lot of upfront investment. The problem with e-learning is that many easy games do not translate well to the virtual world or they require a lot of complex graphic design and programming. Here are a few in-person-type games translated to e-learning using simple tools you should already have.

Get Them to Draw It

  1. E-mail one student a graphic of a unique arrangement of shapes – perhaps a circle, square and triangle touching each other.
  2. Tell the person (publicly in the meeting room) that their task is to get the group to draw what’s in the e-mail without using words to describe any shapes, such as circle, box, triangle, pyramid, hexagon, etc.
  3. Have a few people use the ‘whiteboard’ feature to draw their responses for everyone to see.
    1. If your meeting environment doesn’t have a whiteboard, participants can use Paint (PC) or Paintbrush (Mac) to draw the design and upload the image to the remote meeting environment for everyone to see. Note: this game does require a method for the entire group to easily see the images.
  4. Most of the time, no one will be able to draw the image correctly. After a few failed attempts, draw the image on the whiteboard (or upload it to the meeting environment) and say “Draw this”.

This illustrates that pre-conceived conceptions can impede success in future efforts. Because you never said they couldn’t draw it on the white board (or upload it to the classroom). (adapted from a LinkedIn post by Bruce Cooper)

Object Memory

  1. Using your topic as inspiration, create a list of 30 words.
  2. Share the list with the group and give everyone 1 minute to remember as many words as they can.
  3. Hide the list and tell people to write down as many words as they can remember, using a word processor and uploading the file to the meeting room. See who came up with the most words.
  4. If the group is large, use breakout rooms to make smaller groups. Otherwise, have the group work together to combine their lists.
  5. Debrief by discussing the benefits of collaboration.

Mad Libs

You probably know, the object of Mad Libs is to produce a story that sounds totally ridiculous. It can also help you illustrate a point in a fun way without a lot of effort.

  1. Write a short story relating to your topic.
  2. Remove about 20 essential words and replace them with their corresponding ‘parts of speech’ – noun, verb, past-tense verb, adjective, adverb, etc. It might be helpful to post a parts of speech chart in the meeting room.
  3. Request suggestions for each missing word to fill in the blanks by telling the group the required part of speech. You can have them call out suggestions, or type suggestions using the chat feature.
  4. Read the completed story out loud.
  5. Debrief and relate the story to your e-course’s topic/lesson.

Brainstorming Madlibs

Image by: Idea Sandbox

Prizes

It’s always fun to win something! You can easily bring fun to an e-learning course by offering a chance to win. Prizes can also incentivize people to participate. Do a random drawing from the people who participated in a chat session or took a poll. Give prizes to the person who scored the highest on an evaluation. Or implement a point system, where people get points for participating. At the end of the course give a prize to the top performers.

There are many ways you can make e-learning fun. By choosing to make learning meaningful and fun you are working towards making your courses extraordinary. Your participants will thank you for it.

How do you bring fun to your courses? Please share below!

For more meeting tips and insights, sign up for the Teamings newsletter.

If your meeting environment can’t handle your method of fun, contact us today! We’re happy to help you find a learning environment that will fit your needs.

 
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