5 training activities that will engage your learners and improve training outcomes
Keeping learners engaged with your online training course can be difficult. The best way to tackle this is to make your training course as interactive as possible - have learners take part in activities both by themselves and with other learners.
Here are 5 training activities that will keep your learners interested and improve your training outcomes.
Role Playing
Taking part in real world role playing scenarios is a great way to consolidate learning. Role playing would work really well in customer facing roles - 1 person can play a customer while one person plays the service employee. It gives one person the chance to practice their job and it gives the other person the chance to put themselves in the customer's shoes; they can improve their knowledge as they can see where the mock employee could be going wrong. Have them swap roles at the end and feedback to each other.
Peer to Peer Collaboration
Another peer to peer idea would be to have learners collaborate on projects together. It could be producing their own training materials based on what they have learnt so far and then producing and demonstrating short presentations. When learners work together they can share knowledge and ask each other questions on areas they may be unsure about.
Competitions
Sticking with the theme of peer to peer learning, a little healthy competition encourages learners to push themselves and ensure they are getting the most out of their learning. The competition could be a leaderboard based on learner engagement or it could be live quizzes over video conferencing tools such as Zoom or Microsoft teams, with small prizes for the winners in each. This activity would work particularly well amongst younger people or industries that already encourage competition.
Serious Games
A good solo training activity would be to use Serious Games. A serious game is a game designed for a purpose other than entertainment. They are used widely in training activities across a range of industries, such as healthcare, defence, science and engineering, politics and many more.
The US army has used its own serious game as a recruitment method since the early 2000’s and simulation type games are used in healthcare training too.
With an estimated market value in 2020 of $6.29 billion, and forecast to rise up to $25.54 billion, there is no shortage of these games and with some smart google searching, you will no doubt manage to find a serious game for your training area and your learners.
Bite-sized tutorial animations
A series of very short, colourful, and engaging animations, which would briefly explain one small area of the training, is a useful way of keeping learners interested and would allow learners to easily return to past material they may need to look over again, without having to search through hour long training videos to find the small piece of information they need. There are many of these already available on the internet for a wide range of different industries.
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