Developing an Immersive Learning Experience for your Learners

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Developing an Immersive Learning Experience for your Learners

Through immersive storytelling you can make the reader feel completely involved in the content. This is a compelling strategy when it comes to eLearning and immersive learning is a powerful educational tool for increasing learner engagement.

3 Steps to Developing an Immersive Learning Experience:

Below are four tips to help you create educational content that hooks your learner.

Emotive Content

Your content needs to engage with your learners on a human level – you do not want them to feel as if they are just cogs in a machine. Try to uncover the people and emotions that lie at the center of your subject or topic.

For example:

When it comes to Time Management courses or training, you could share a story about a busy, overworked parent who managed to restructure their days, making sure they could spend quality time with their family.

Your learners are going to engage with your content if they can identify with it on a human level – an emotional level.

Show them, don’t tell them

Don’t just list certain events to a learner, describe a scenario and let them derive their own meaning from this. The learner will then have to engage with the content to come to their own conclusions. See below examples, and compare the two.

Example One

“I won the competition Mom!” Samantha said, as she jumped through the front door, dropping her school bags on the floor and dancing into the kitchen. Samantha’s mother did not acknowledge the statement, and continued reading her magazine. After a minute with no answer, Samantha quietly walked to her room.

Example Two

Samantha was so excited to tell her mother about his big win! She ran home from school to tell her mother about this achievement. Samantha’s mother expressed little interest in the achievement, not even looking up from the magazine she was reading. Samantha left the room feeling disappointed.

Now, if we had to compared the two examples, it is very clear in example one that Samantha felt disappointed but it is never explicitly stated that she is – this is made clear using IMMERSIVE storytelling.

Enabling Participation

Always encourage engagement with learners by inviting them to play a role within your story. An effective way to do this is through simulations, or asking a learner what they would do when confronted in a situation that has been described.

The purpose is to give the learner the opportunity to make choices and you can then show them the consequence of these choices. To do this successfully, you need to give your learners a variety of options, and make sure all options are viable so as not to interrupt the flow of your learning path or story.