I’m an old fogey. As a kid, my parents used to come into my room while I was studying and yell at me to turn off that horrible rock and roll on my transistor radio. Now kids are writing a term paper, listening to their docked iPod with a phone bud in their ear, following four IM sessions and keeping up on email. And it works for them.
So how do we train today’s workers? We sit them in a room for days. We flash endless static screens at them, read the onscreen words to them, and show them animations that look like a 1990-era video game. It’s no wonder you can’t get them into class and they won’t take time to finish your eLearning.
The lesson? Learners are used to getting their information on TV by watching real people integrated with graphics and special effects.
The fancy Web animations used in many training applications today are not only needlessly expensive, they often are not even effective. Learners don’t want boring reading, cartoonish animations, text-only visuals, static pictures or cartoons, or disembodied talking heads next to content. They want the evening news, Entertainment Tonight, or The Soup. If your eLearning isn’t using instructor-over-content video, then you’re not creating content that your learners want and expect to see.
How “fogey-ish” is your e-content?
** Guest Blogger **
