All blog posts ……..Start each work week with the latest issue. Scroll down to subscribe!

5 Tweaks to make your instruction more appealing

Are you familiar with the old saying, “A spoonful of sugar makes the medicine go down”? 

It’s true! (Metaphorically, of course.)

And it applies not just to life in general, but to instructional design in particular.

• If our instruction is optional for a given set of learners, the value of appeal is obvious: making our learning appealing can encourage learners to sign up for our instruction and complete it.
• If our instruction is required (such as a mandatory business training), making it appealing can help our learners approach it with a relaxed attitude that might encourage them to interact with it longer and get more out of it.

Best of all, because there’s considerable overlap between “appeal” and “effectiveness,” applying the strategies listed below can also improve learner outcomes directly.

1. Start with a realistic, compelling hook. 

Lead by telling audiences what’s in it for them.  How might completing your instruction potentially help them in their role?  Their career?  Might it put them in the running for an attractive opportunity or reward? Could it solidify their feeling of being part of a group?

Tip:  If it’s hard to come up with a realistic benefit, a) It might be worth bringing this to the attention of whoever’s making the training mandatory (because it probably shouldn’t be), and 2) You’ll likely want to double down on strategy #2 below.

2. Keep your instruction short. 

Respect your learners’ time. Your materials should include only the information and practice necessary to meet your pre-defined learning objectives.

Tip: Time spent on a scope and sequence pays off here, because without a a well-organized table of contents, content presentation will ramble. 

Tip:  Always include a text-only version of your instructional materials. Doing so enables impatient learners to consume content much quicker than they could if they had to watch videos and work through interactives.

3. Focus on making your instruction clear, sensible, and action-oriented.  

Throughout the design phase, imaging that you’re explaining concepts and demonstrating skills to a friend or workmate.  Doing so helps you focus on real-world application and gotchas.  It also helps you choose words and scenarios that resonate immediately your audience (vs. ones that sound good to the higher-ups but that are vague or confusing). When audiences find information to be clear and reasonable—and when they can see immediately how to put it into practice—they feel smart. And feeling smart is extremely appealing.

Tip:  Implementing this strategy requires you to know how to present concepts in real-world terms; perform each step of a skill or tasks yourself (vs. relying on SME information); and anticipate and proactively address potential problems, misunderstandings, and questions.

4. Use plausible, interesting examples. 

Good, realistic examples both of how to do something correctly and what happens when something isn’t done correctly can bring information and procedures to life—clarifying learners’ understanding, helping them to recall information, and enabling them to think critically about your training topic.  Contrived, ultra-simplified examples, however, can set unrealistic expectations and be worse than no examples at all.

Tip: Don’t provide an example of the “happy path” and nothing else.  Provide multiple realistic, average, workhorse examples that vary slightly. Only after learners are comfortable with following steps associated with a range of normal scenarios should you present them with the exceptions.

5. Avoid gamification.

Some audiences may be thrilled by scavenger hunts and leader boards, but many emphatically are not. Gamification for the sake of gamification often leads to forced, uninteresting activities that don’t drive mastery, make learners’ eyes roll, and bloat the time it takes learners to complete training. And from a development perspective, interesting games that do training content justice are typically tough to design and time-consuming to implement and maintain.

Tip:  Only incorporate gamification if the activities are relevant, well-designed, and you know without a doubt that they will drive mastery in a way that delights (or at least doesn’t bore or irritate) learners.

The bottom line (TLDR)

When we’re looking to improve outcomes, focusing on audience appeal is just what the doctor ordered! It pays off in two ways:

1. It leads indirectly to positive learning outcomes by encouraging learners to spend more time with, and pay closer attention to, instruction (strategies 1 and 2); and
   
   
2. It leads directly to positive learning outcomes because high-quality, compelling instruction is worth spending more time with and paying closer attention to (strategies 3, 4, and 5).

What’s YOUR take?

Do you have a different point of view? Something to add? A request for an article on a different topic? Please considering sharing your thoughts, questions, or suggestions for future blog articles in the comment box below.

• LinkedIn