Let us bust the last myth of the series –
Myth 5: No need to waste time on summary screens. Just put some key points as a bullet list.
Let us see what a summary means both from learners’, and an instructional designer’s perspective.
For a learner – It enables you to reinforce the most important points from a chapter, in a condensed form.
For an instructional designer –
1. A last reinforcement, that acts as a take away for the entire chapter.
2. Mapping the chapter, as per the course objectives
Clearly, a bullet list of key points won’t do justice to both the requirements
So, an instructional designer is required to find innovative ways in which s/he can –
1. Pack the entire content into a few screens. A learner can use them for revision, without the fear of missing a topic
2. Help the user map entire chapter in a memory friendly way
3. Still create the curiosity for the learner to go through it, although he has just now gone through the complete chapter
Let us explore some ways in which we can do that.
By keeping it simple – A simple memory map covering all the discussed topics is sufficient, to reinforce the key take aways.
By aligning the summary points to the objectives of the chapter – A heads-up to the learner that he has completed the objectives, then summarizing the milestones in the order of their occurrence will definitely give your course/ chapter ‘Red Bull’ wings J. Converting the objectives as milestones, then demonstrating the learner, how far he has come, helps in pushing the learner to explore further topics
By making it interactive – The learner has recently completed a marathon. Why would he take a short sprint of reinforcing the concepts? Unless that has an interesting experience! Making the summary interactive, or even better – turning it into a game, takes the user experience to another level.
With this finally we conclude our series on busting the common myths – related to e-learning. Hope, this has helped you.
In the previous posts, we have covered the following topics –
Myth 1: Learning the e-learning tools are very difficult, hence creating an e-learning is difficult
Myth 2: Books are better than e-learning. My course cannot surpass a book
Myth 3: Just put the content with some relevant pictures and my job is done
Myth 4: Engaging the user means a self check with some options. That’s it!