— This post was written by Elizabeth Seymour —

Here is a quick shortlist of some points you can implement for your eLearning tools to make them for interactive and more compelling for your learners:

• 
  Explore
  Humans are naturally inquisitive, so you can entice your learners by inviting them to explore through your content, rather than just present the information to them sequentially. Give people the opportunity to actively engage with your content every step of the way by building interactive elements in – let them learn by doing rather than reading or listening.Giving your learners a chance to explore and you will not only capture their attention, but you will also make sure they will retain more of what they learn.
• 
  Relate
  Give your package a problem to solve that’s contextually relevant to your learners. If problems are relatable for the learners, they will be more motivated to solve them, so make the reason why the content is relevant explicitly obvious to them. If you are able to add an emotional component as well this will make an even stronger connection with your learners, which will lead to higher engagement with the learning material.
• 
  Personalise
  Ask learners personal questions to connect them with the content – “What do you think? What do you want to do?” This makes them personally involved in your content, and more likely to interact. Adding in a form of story – give their decisions consequences – and it will make this stronger still, if a learner’s decisions have impact they will be more drawn into the content.

Also there are a few points to avoid when building compelling interactions:

• Obviously, your content needs to be challenging to be engaging, but be careful not to make it too hard, or your learners will lose interest.
• Avoid adding interaction for it’s own sake – too many unnecessary clicks puts people off.

Hopefully some of these simple points will help to make your eLearning tools more compelling and make your learners interact/engage more, which should lead to a deeper learning!

– Summarized from “Building Compelling Interactions – What You Need to Know” by Articulate.