Enhancing Training Experiences: Instructional Design Strategies
High return on investment is always expected from an eLearning program but achieving it is a big concern. Be it an app, game or a course, you need a plan or a strategy in place to achieve the expected outcome. Same goes with the ELearning design for training. An eLearning program designed with a robust instructional design strategy has the potential to fulfil the needs of learner and to attain his or her goals.
What is Instructional design strategy? It is a well outlined plan of how to teach a particular subject. It begins with setting goals and determining actions that must take place to meet those goals, utilising various resources, techniques and devices. One must analyse the learners profile and the outcome desired to finalise the instructional strategy which is centred towards the learner. Instructional design strategy is important as it facilitates learning with innovative approaches. An ideal solution for designing a strategy will be through exploration and discovery of various learning elements.
Instructional Design Strategies that have proven to enhance the Training Experiences
There are few instructional design strategies that have proven to enhance the training experiences of various organisations. Keeping the learner engaged throughout the course is a challenge for instructional designers. Hence they should create interactive content that breaks the monotony. One of the best key strategies used to captivate the learners attention is through storytelling, which is often considered a powerful approach for a perceptual learning experience. An interesting plot, characters, strong narrative and a message will contextualise the learning experience.
Getting the learner involved will not only improve the learners engagement but also challenges them to take decisions. Scenario based learning puts the learner in a real life situation and brings out a behavioural response. Learners use their strategic thinking and problem solving skills to venture out of the scenario.
To avoid subjective overload of content, an emerging Instructional design strategy delivers content in a bite size with a key take away. In the present day scenario, learners are distracted and find information boring. Providing them with such micro learning content would help retain the learner attention span and would bring out excellent results.
Today one of the hottest trends in eLearning is gamification. It’s basically using game design techniques in non-game context. This strategy takes the learning experience to the next level with enhanced knowledge retention and performance. Gamification helps one create immersive learning environment. Gamification can be used in different training programs such as on- boarding training, product training and safety training, etc.
Apart for the above mentioned instructional design strategies, there are many more such strategies such as case studies, inquiry based learning, reflective learning, etc. Creating an impactful eLearning course depends on selecting the right instructional design strategy. There are various aspects that needs to be taken into consideration while selecting the instructional design strategy, such as the users, subject matter, and the learning environment. The developers should mainly focus on the budget and the resources allocated and come up with the best instructional design strategy for effective learning.
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