Ask any L&D Manager for their list of concerns, and you’ll find that it’s rather lengthy:
- Relevance and alignment to business goals
- Technology integration
- Scalability
- Engagement
- Impact on performance
- Return on investment
to name a few.
All are important but if you take a closer look, you might find that one of these is the cornerstone on which all others rest: engagement.
Why engagement matters
If learners don’t engage, they don’t learn, they don’t retain, they don’t develop new skills, and so they certainly don’t put them into practice—which makes it hard to justify L&D’s existence, much less budget.
The Instructional Designer’s role
As instructional designers, our roles may not require us to focus on the business-related concerns. But engagement falls squarely into the instructional design camp.
We have a plethora of intellectual tools and processes to guide us in designing effective e-learning: ADDIE, Bloom’s Taxonomy, Gagne’s Nine Events, and many more. These are immensely helpful, but they are also fairly high level.
They aren’t as useful when the proverbial rubber hits the road, that moment when we must design exactly what the learner will see, think, feel and do when they click on ‘Start’ and the course begins.
Exactly what words, images, activities, and layouts do we use to grab their attention and get them to dive in rather than crank up the Keurig to stay awake? To lead their mind to grasp a new idea or master a new skill?
Learning from advertising
The ‘rules of engagement’ are sparse — at least within the ID universe. I’ve personally spent hours looking for research-based best practices. There are not many studies that address instructional design at such a granular level.
But there is a set of best practices we can borrow from, if we are willing to explore outside our profession to other fields with similar goals.
Think media. Specifically, advertising.
- Decades of experience in combining language and images
- Mastery in teaching and prompting action
- Highly motivated to find effective methods
A TV commercial, costing millions to produce, has 30 seconds to both teach a viewer something important about a product and motivate them to buy it. There are some powerful presentation rules at work here.
As we work to make our e-learning come alive, it makes sense to tap into the decades of research into consumer perception and behavior to see how it can help us generate engaging and effective e-learning. We can also learn from filmmakers how to use storytelling to teach and motivate, and the rules for making our stories compelling.
The universal human mind
Regardless of intent, the human mind processes language and imagery in particular ways. What works in advertising or filmmaking can work in e-learning.
At Strategy to Revenue:
- Our team combines backgrounds in media design, production, and learning
- We use established instructional design principles and processes
- We incorporate rules of engagement from powerful media
Result: Engaging, effective, and budget-friendly e-learning solutions. Fill out the form if you’re interested in learning more.
