“This is boring!”

Updated: Feb 23

In other words what kind of goals and objectives should we set for our e-learning?

“All my lessons (or learning experiences) are fun and engaging.”

- said no educator or instructional designer ever.

However, “I want something that is fun and engaging!” – it’s a request we hear so often no matter what kind of learning context we are working in.

So, should we mainly focus on designing learning to be fun and engaging?

In this post, I’ll try to collect ideas to consider in order to be able to create more meaningful and enjoyable learning experiences.

What I learnt from teaching

As an e-learning developer who has a background in teaching, I was surprised to realise the similarity between the two fields in terms of needs and expectations. I sort of got used to hearing such (rare) on-the-spot reactions as “Teacher this is boring!” which were difficult to take at the beginning but got much easier as I progressed in my teaching career. While I am sure these comments somehow genuinely described the quality of the content I decided (or was asked) to bring in to the classroom, they also made me reflect on how the main goals of my lessons needed to be set.

Based on the various feedback I received, I tried out different methods, and what I learnt from those is that I could have lessons where I didn’t hear: “this is boring!” anymore, but then somebody would say: “we are not learning enough” or ask “what’s the point of all this?” Then there were other situations when most of the students were seemingly engaging well with the material and showing evidence of the learning but some of them still said it was boring.

How does this work in digital learning?

After I started working on instructional design and e-learning development projects, I noticed that a frequent comment was (again): we don’t want something boring; we’d like to create learning that is fun and engaging.

And how do we plan to achieve that?

A common answer to that would be to have more videos, activities, animations, and so on. While I’m sure these can all contribute to creating more enjoyable experiences, I don’t think they’re the main (?) or only factors that define a “good e-learning course”.

So what are the main elements then?

In my understanding, one of the (if not the) most crucial elements of creating good lessons or e-learning courses is factoring in individual differences as much as possible. There’re numerous aspects to think about when we design our learning experiences but one thing is the same. They’re made for humans who all have different preferences, motivations and backgrounds.

The human-centred design

Even though in teaching it’s mostly referred to as “individual differences”, it was great to find out that there’s a term for this theory in instructional design too, called the human-centred design.

Without going into the details of it too much, let’s have a look at the possible viewpoints of some of the activities that could be part of this approach.

To learn more about the potential activities related to human-centred design, click the following link.

As you can see, there are quite a few things to consider based on the theory. Yes, I understand that it can be difficult to apply all these as part of our learning design due to the lack of time, information or resources, but at the same time, I think these points can be very useful when thinking about the context of our learners, i.e. the people who will experience our learning and whose behavioural change we’re trying to achieve in order to perform a task differently or handle situations in a better way.

By understanding how they think, what they want, it becomes easier to personalise the material and focus on things that they need and they find useful which eventually will make the whole experience less “boring” and more beneficial.

Conclusion

This post wasn’t at all aiming to undermine the importance of making learning fun and engaging. On the contrary, it attempts to identify some of the factors that can contribute to making successful learning experiences which learners enjoy and help them achieve their goals.

And now, let’s hear what you think!

How do you create engaging e-learning courses or lessons?

I'd love to see what you think about this topic! Please leave your comment below.