4 Tips to Enhance Learner Motivation with Articulate Storyline 360

Why is Motivation Important in eLearning?

Motivation is a process through which individuals select, initiate, and persistently carry out goal-directed activities to reach a desired mental, emotional, or practical threshold. Motivation, thus, ensures completion.

With higher learner dropout rates seen across eLearning courses, maintaining high motivation levels becomes crucial.

Motivated learners have a higher morale, feel a greater sense of direction, and reap better benefits from training efforts as a result.

In the context of corporate eLearning, training that motivates employees also boosts their overall enthusiasm for the job. This matters because employees who are motivated at the job are more engaged and produce better outcomes for the business.

The following statistics illustrate the aforementioned points perfectly:

• According to a Gallup study, improving employee engagement has reduced turnover rates by 43% and 18% in low-turnover and high-turnover organizations, respectively
• On the other hand, employees would prefer to receive training and keep their jobs instead of making a switch. A massive 74% of working professionals have echoed this sentiment (PwC Global, 2014)

Hence, to enhance learner motivation in eLearning is to uplift your business outcomes.

Instructional Design Principles to Enhance Learner Motivation

Conscious, sound, and intentional instructional design can squash some of the obstacles to creating motivating eLearning experiences. Kim and Fricks (2011) proposed the following principles for the same:

1. Providing learners with relevant and useful content
2. Stimulating learner interest through multimedia content
3. Simulating the real world in course learning activities
4. Matching the complexity of the content to the learner’s familiarity and expertise with the topic
5. Incorporating hands-on learning experiences and activities
6. Giving learners feedback about their performance and learning
7. Designing an easily navigable eLearning environment
8. Incorporating social elements into the eLearning experience

Some common themes in these principles are:

• Involving learners in the learning process, and
• Providing them with content that is easy to connect with

Here is where Articulate Storyline 360 comes in. Articulate Storyline 360 is a versatile eLearning rapid authoring tool that can be used to create enriching learning experiences that keep learners motivated and engaged. It supports everything from multimedia to interactive storytelling and gamification in eLearning courses.

How to Enhance Learner Motivation with Articulate Storyline 360

In an eLearning environment, transactional distance influences learner motivation (Hartnett, 2016).

Transactional distance is the psychological distance learners feel from instructors in online learning. The lower the transactional distance between learners and the content, the better. Structure and dialogue can be used to achieve this.

Structure refers to how the course is configured; it can be rigid or flexible. A more structured course typically creates lesser transactional distance.

Dialogue refers to the level of interaction learners have with instructors. As with structure, higher dialogue leads to lower transactional distance. There are many ways to incorporate interaction into courses. It might not always be possible to provide direct learner-instructor communication, in these cases, indirect communication must be incorporated.

By keeping these elements in mind, you can effectively enhance learner motivation with Articulate Storyline 360’s full range of features. Let us look at some actionable ways to achieve this:

Building excitement and interest using multimedia and dialogue

Articulate Storyline 360 supports a variety of multimedia elements and offers immense flexibility in design. You can use this versatility and flexibility to your benefit by adding videos, images, icons, illustrations, GIFs, and audio files. Storyline has options to embed content or insert files from your local machine. Multimedia naturally builds interest in learners by giving them a multimodal learning experience that they can engage with using multiple senses and faculties. However, multimedia can also be used to open up dialogues with learners through avatars, comics, interactive illustrations, mascots, etc. Additionally, pre-recorded videos and podcasts can be used to facilitate indirect interaction with instructors.

Story-based learning

Story-based learning adapts narrative elements into an eLearning format in order to introduce core concepts and skills to learners. This type of learning has some key elements:

• A protagonist
• A plot
• Conflict, challenges, and obstacles
• Mechanisms for making choices that influence outcomes and deliver important lessons

Stories instantly capture attention and motivate learners to find out more. eLearning as a medium can make the story experience explorative, where learners need to think about their choices to influence the narrative in the desired manner.

Due to Articulate Storyline’s wide range of functionalities, you can create vivid scenes in it using backgrounds, characters and avatars, illustrations, and dialogues. Additionally, Articulate Storyline supports branching, allowing you to set specific outcomes for learners’ choices. Story-based learning also provides learners with structure and dialogue, reducing the transactional distance. Hence, crafting a relevant narrative with outcomes that facilitate learning is another way you can enhance learner motivation with Articulate Storyline 360.

Gamification

Like story-based learning, gamification is a technique that introduces game elements to an otherwise non-game environment. In gamification, learners are presented with a problem they attempt to solve. Based on their attempt, they receive instant feedback about their choice and a reward for the correct/desired choice. Gamification in eLearning is often used to test learners’ knowledge through quizzes or to teach using an interactive question-and-answer format. With Articulate Storyline 360, you can use triggers and branching to the fullest in order to create a highly engaging gamified learning experience. You can also utilize multimedia to give the activity a pleasant look and feel.

Additionally, you can build customized scoreboards and leaderboards and incorporate collectible currencies as part of the gamification. Learners can also pick avatars to make the experience as customized as possible. Humans have a natural tendency to solve problems and derive motivation through rewards and feedback. Thus, gamification is another technique to enhance learner motivation with Articulate Storyline 360.

Voiceovers

You can also insert voiceovers into Articulate Storyline 360 courses as it supports adding audio files, as discussed previously. Voiceovers can make a course more dynamic by providing an auditory learning experience. Additionally, voiceovers create dialogue, reducing the transactional distance learners feel. Voiceovers also allow you to reach a broader audience, such as visually impaired learners or learners who speak a different language.

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Conclusion

Creating and maintaining online learners’ motivation requires extra attention when designing a learning experience. To achieve this, L&D professionals need to incorporate rich and dynamic elements into courses. However, eLearning professionals can effectively enhance learning motivation with Articulate Storyline 360 due to its wide range of functionalities and flexibility.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

What is learner motivation in eLearning?

Motivation is a process through which individuals select, initiate, and persistently carry out goal-directed activities to reach a desired mental, emotional, or practical threshold. In eLearning, learner motivation ensures course completion and successful learning.

What impacts learner motivation in eLearning?

In eLearning, certain broad themes have been seen to impact learner motivation. They are:

• Involving learners in the learning process, and
• Providing them with content that is easy to connect with

Additionally, the transactional distance must also be taken into account. Transactional distance is the psychological distance learners feel from instructors in online learning. The lower the transactional distance between learners and the content, the better. Structure and dialogue can be used to achieve this.

How can you enhance learner motivation with Articulate Storyline 360?

4 of the most effective ways to enhance learner motivation with Articulate Storyline 360 are:

• Building excitement and interest using multimedia and dialogue
• Story-based learning
• Gamification
• Voiceovers

References

https://www.pwc.com/gx/en/services/workforce/publications/workforce-of-the-future.html

Hartnett, Maggie. (2016). The Importance of Motivation in Online Learning. 10.1007/978-981-10-0700-2_2.