eLearn: Best Practices

Description

Tips and Tools for Fostering a Creative e-Learning Class

By Susan Doctoroff Landay, President of Trainers Warehouse

September 10, 2009

Despite the effectiveness of e-learning, online learners remain notorious for losing focus, getting bored, checking email, chatting, texting, sorting through piles of neglected mail, or tuning out altogether. It's not their fault.

We trainers haven't equipped our online learners with an arsenal of tools and toys that will help them stay focused. Knowing what we know about the effectiveness of brain-based learning (also called active learning or accelerated learning), it's up to us to apply our best practices in live, classroom training to enhance the effectiveness of the online learning experiences we conduct.

Indeed, online learners are entitled to enjoy the benefit of the balls, toys, visual stimuli, icebreakers, discussions, and interactive exercises that have become standard in most live training sessions.

Here, we will look at some popular classroom methods of addressing the kinesthetic, visual, tactile, and interactive needs of learners, and explore some low cost ways to help our online learners make the most of their remote learning experience.

Make kinesthetic learning tools available

Classroom learning gurus talk a lot about the need to create a stress-free and emotionally engaging learning environment. To do this, face-to-face trainers "color" their training rooms with signage that sets the ground rules and expectations, they play music, and set tables with tent cards, colorful markers and fiddle toys (to help kinesthetic learners better focus).

Why not set the same goals for the online learning experiences you initiate? Currently with online learning, the balance seems to shift to auditory and visual learning. Why not equip online learners with a tangible stress ball or "fiddle" toy to occupy their hands while their eyes and ears are busy?

Though it may be counterintuitive, doodling ...

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