Remember the school days? They were not only about making new friends, sharing lunches, having crushes, and dreaming of making it to the basketball team. There were some trying times too. For some, the Algebra class was a nightmare while for others, History lessons brought out the tears. Yet, the demons are not inside the formulae, dates, or maps. How a subject is taught has a lot to do with how well we learn it. Not every one of us had a passion for Literature, but we all loved it when Mrs. Smith made us dress up and play the characters from the stories we had to read. Not of all of us have grown up to become chemists, but many would love to go back to Mr. Henry's laboratory to once more have fun mixing chemicals. The reason we see so many boring and passive eLearning is because it is just flat out easier for the designer. It is challenging to create learning that engages learners, that fires up their brain's synapses and makes content stick. But all you instructional designers out there, you have to take up this challenge; you owe this to your learners who have probably stayed back, rescheduled their meetings, or postponed tasks to take your course.

Everybody loves a good story, even your (seemingly) staid and somber corporate learners. That's because, a child lurks inside all of us; he loves to peek into other people's lives and go with them on their journeys. Unconsciously, he tries to identify himself with the good guy in the story—the one who overcomes all challenges, bashes the baddies, and emerges as the hero in the end. Stories are captivating. The actions of the protagonist, who we can relate to, inspire us to think or act similarly. This is why, stories have been used throughout the ages to teach morals and values to children. You can also use stories to teach your corporate learners technical and soft skills that will help them further their careers. There are four basic type of stories. You have to know about them before you can choose a format that best fits the drab learning matter and tell a story that your learners will lap up.

Happy New Year! It is that time of the year when we get busy making resolutions. It is a time of hope and new beginnings. We resolve to lose weight, manage our time better, become more productive, and turn over a new leaf. This year, let's resolve to become more empathetic eLearning designers. We can resolve to stop churning out cookie-cutter courses, and instead, create learning material that is truly inspiring. We can resolve to stop talking down to our learners, and instead, reach out and connect with them. We can resolve to stop being aloof, and instead, show more empathy. According to Theresa Wiseman, the four attributes of empathy are putting yourself in another person's shoes, understanding their feelings, accepting them non-judgmentally, and communicating with them to make them feel assured and cared for.

The year is about to end, and people around seem to have gone into a nostalgic mood. Websites are fondly remembering what took place in the year gone by—trends that ruled the ramp, blockbusters that broke box-office records, and men, women, and events that made an impact. Year-end seems to be the ideal time for reflection and recapitulation. So why don't we? As eLearning professionals, we learned many important lessons in 2014. Let's take stock of these:

eLearning and Learner Engagement: What is learner engagement? It’s not just about keeping your students busy. It’s keeping your students motivated, giving them the tools that they need to learn, and fostering a sense of pride in achieving personal goals. It’s about encouraging learning for the pure love of it, not just for the sake of getting grades. When learners are working hard to absorb the material the course offers, and they’re committed to learning that comes without reward other than the learning itself, then they’re engaged. Engagement requires an emotional connection between the content and the learner. And the only way we can do that is by knowing what drives people to spend time, effort, and energy learning your content. This post will help you understand this thoroughly and even learn how to apply it to your eLearning.

Persuasion is an art. Try too hard, and you might be branded as being aggressive. Be gentle, and your message will probably be brushed aside. At the end, the ultimate goal of persuasion is to get a person to change. Persuading someone to come round to your point of view is especially challenging in a virtual learning environment that lacks the intimacy of a face-to-face interaction. What is more, your learner has a choice to go or not go through your course. Thankfully, researchers have figured out how the learner's mind works and how to "persuade" it to fall in line with your content. Monroe's Motivated Sequence lists a proven process—Hook, Need, Solution, Visualization, and Action—to convert a reluctant learner into an enthusiastic participant who readily absorbs the learning and willingly agrees to change his behavior. In eLearning, "telling isn't teaching," and you cannot persuade if you just state the facts. Facts alone won’t significantly change the way people think, do, and feel. You have to carefully choose every element on the screen to do all the coaxing, cajoling, imploring, and pleading to engage and persuade your learners to do something new. Follow this no-fail process for creating eLearning that persuades and changes behaviors.

Bad Stock Photos Make for Bad eLearning How often have you gone to a website, looked at the photos, and said “Oh yeah, there are the happy clapping people, and there’s the arrow going into the target, and there’s the thermometer showing sales figures, and… yawn.” Probably more times than you could count. Does that really make you want to read the content? Does it do anything to enhance the information that’s there? Of course it doesn’t. And the same things that are beyond boring and beyond overdone on various websites are going to be equally as un-engaging if you use them on your eLearning course. The dilemma with stock photos is that cheesy-to-the-maximum, cliché, exaggerated, awkward and fake photos do not connect with an audience of learners. You have to make images speak to your learners. Images need to say the 1,000 words you actually want them to. The ideal case is that you take your own photos, but we know that not everyone has the budget, time or available resources, so if you must use stock photography, make sure it’s relevant, not hideously overused and think creatively about choosing and editing them in unique ways.

Do you buy clothes online without looking at the photographs? What sounds more exciting—reading about a seaside town or actually walking through the streets of one while smelling the sea in the air? Why is your computer crammed full with photographs and videos of long-gone birthday parties and family picnics? That is because, we love images! Images talk to us, move us, make us remember, and inspire us in ways that words hardly can. We also happen to learn better through images than with text. The human brain processes visuals 60,000 times quicker than text!