Motivation In eLearning

Building motivation in learners involves a heavy focus on intrinsic motivation. Intrinsic motivation is a learners individual desire to undertake the lesson due to interest, relevance and or curiosity. It is crucial for access to effective and strong learning, in particular developing successful eLearning courses. Here’s how to implement motivation in eLearning!

Make it relevant

Many eLearning courses fail to motivate a learner because they lack relevance to employees. Especially in regards to corporate or workplace based training, the learner wants to know why the information is relevant to them and how they can practice what they have learned. This means that the content should recognise and link to the learner’s prior knowledge and experiences. Thereby, by activating what they already know, learners are able to situate their new knowledge within a cognitive framework which they have already established. Providing context for new knowledge is also important. For example, by providing real life examples or case studies, a learner can imagine themselves within a situation whereby the content is useful.

Relevance can similarly be achieved through the incorporation of social or peer learning. Through interactive elements such as comment forums and video responses, experienced students can position themselves as experts on the topic and assist novices in their understanding. This relationship is proven to be beneficial to both parties, experts can experience a boost in confidence and opportunities to practice reiterating the information, and novices can benefit from the expert’s knowledge.

Make it interesting

Another way of increasing the likelihood of intrinsic motivation towards your eLearning courses is to make your content. This sounds obvious, but too often information can be presented in a manner which lacks creativity, interactivity or variation. In eLearning this may involve varying the manner in which simple text or images are presented. eLearning is unique that it allows lots of opportunity to incorporate multimedia and real-time responses to content. However educators must be careful when using multimedia authoring, to ensure that is not simply included for novelty, rather, engages the learner and enhances their understanding of the content. 

Provide feedback

Learners want relevant feedback on their learning responses. Feedback in eLearning can boost the learners confidence, due to the way they can be provided with instant feedback on their learning, thereby increasing the relevance to them at current. 

eLearning is unique as it allows time for learners to undertake and reflect on their learning in their own time. There is little to no pressure to get things right the first time, and novices can feel uninhibited by hesitancy to attempt questions they are unsure about.

If you would like to learn more about how to build the most effective employee training strategy and motivation in eLearning!

If you’d like to know more about how SC Training (formerly EdApp)’s mobile learning platform can help your internal training practices, get in touch at enquiries@edapp.com. You can also try SC Training (formerly EdApp)’s Mobile LMS and authoring tool for free by signing up here.

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