Finding The Right Training Method To Engage Your Learners

Determine the best strategy for your workforce

When it comes to finding the right training method to engage your employees, there are a few proven methods you can try. You can encourage and engage learners on cognitive, emotional, behavioral, and social levels by providing quality course content, offering online and real-world rewards, and by enabling them to learn from each other through social learning. Still, to do all that and more, you'll need to use the right tools to assure success.

Here are a few of the tools that major organizations are using to foster a learning and development culture in the workplace.
 

In general, Serious Games, also known as Game-Based Learning (GBL), are used to teach content that might not be explicitly interesting to learners, such as compliance and safety training. With Serious Games, learners have to actively engage with the learning experience, thus cutting out monotony and removing boredom. Serious Games involve storylines, game mechanics, and interactivity. They also remove any risks that might be involved in learning about dangerous situations in the workplace.
 
GBL involves creating an original game for educational purposes. This training method requires a different thought process to design. In addition, it usually requires more time, money, and effort than creating a slide-based eLearning module. However, the payoff, or ROI, is almost always worth it. When you make learning feel like play, employees will enjoy the experience more and learn the content on a deeper level.

Playing is not just for children! Adults enjoy playing games as well. By including gamification into your training course design, you can add a fun element as well as make the content easier to digest for learners. Gamification, unlike GBL, involves adding game elements to your course design. Badges, leaderboards, points systems, and contests are all game elements that can be incorporated into an instructional module.

This style of education involves both physical and online presence from both teachers and students. There are many models for efficient blended learning. One method is to assign online pre-work for learners to complete before they attend a classroom training. This ensures everyone is up to speed before the group session begins. Another idea is to send microlearning modules as follow-up elements after an instructor-led training. These can reinforce the information discussed in the classroom or introduce tangential topics. You can experiment with different ways to pair in-person training with self-paced tools. The consensus among teaching professionals, instructional designers, and learners alike, is that blended learning is one of the most efficient methods you can use to engage learners.

While Simulations were harder to employ in the past, largely due to the costs involved, today many companies are looking to customize in-house learning by using this tool. Simulations place learners in real-world experiences without any of the risks. They increase critical thinking skills and solidify newly acquired knowledge and skills because of their high visual impact.

mLearning is one of the most successful methods of teaching and learning today. And, considering that the number of handheld device usage is steadily increasing, this style of content delivery is booming. There are a few good reasons why mLearning is a big hit, such as more intuitive user interaction, faster access, and anytime-anywhere access. But, the most important is easy accessibility.

If you want to learn about something new, all you have to do is reach for your phone. This tiny supercomputer is glued to users' hands like an appendix and you can use it to empower your employee learners to learn more. You can buy an education delivery app or hire a professional team to develop a bespoke application that caters to your specific needs and business goals.

Virtual Reality (VR) is generally thought to include Augmented Reality (AR) and Mixed Reality. These are technologies that will dominate the eLearning market for the foreseeable future. When a learner uses VR, they are transported into a version of reality in which anything is possible. It is a completely separate world where the user is disconnected completely from the outside.

AR is very different as it involves overlapping digitally generated images onto real-life objects or environments. So, the user is still aware of their surroundings but relies on a digital device to access information about a particular tool, machine, or object. Mixed Reality, or MR, is simply a mix of VR and AR. There are many benefits to using this technology, the most important being that it removes the fear of failure a learner might have.