How to design thought-provoking interactions

What types of elearning interactions will really engage your learners? Let’s look at how you can turn run-of-the-mill clicking into more memorable, challenging activities.

Which interactions make you think?

First, imagine that you’re taking a required course on ethics. Which of the following interactions would really engage your brain?

1. Roll over a three-part diagram that says that ethics is a cornerstone of your employer’s beliefs.
2. Click a photo of a person to listen to a narrator read a script about the importance of ethics.
3. Drag the word “ethical” to the correct definition.
4. Help a fictional character determine if they’re about to do business with a sanctioned country.
5. Tell a fictional character what to do next when a contractor charges a suspicious fee.
6. Write an email to a fictional team member describing the ethical problems of an action they’ve just taken.

Obviously, the last three interactions would make you think more. Why? Because they:

• Mirror what you might have to do in real life, which is rarely simple
• Ask you to make decisions that would have potentially serious effects in the real world

Your employer won’t be fined if you drag “ethical” to the wrong definition. However, they could be fined if you tell a team member to go ahead and accept the “consulting fee” that’s really a bribe.

I would also argue that the more complex interactions appeal to us more because they respect our intelligence. They ask us to weigh a situation and decide for ourselves instead of dumping information on us.

How can you make simple interactions more challenging?

Now imagine that you have the chance to redesign the ethics course. How could you turn those first three interactions into more interesting activities?

1. Roll over a three-part diagram that says that ethics is a cornerstone of your employer’s beliefs.

Replacement: Here’s one thing you could do instead: Show a scene from a business deal. The protagonist, a fictional employee, has decided to sign a deal with a new partner. You show some of the details of the transaction, one of which should raise an ethical red flag for a few of your learners. Then you ask the learner to choose the most likely headline that will result from this transaction.

The options could range from “Company X wins £5m deal with DarkSide PLC” to “Company X fined £7m for doing business with sanctioned entity.”

In the feedback, explain why the transaction would have gotten that headline and that headlines like this are one reason why ethical behavior is so important to the company.

Because learners know they’re taking an ethics course, their ethics radar will be on high alert. As a result, you don’t want to use an obviously unethical business deal as your example. Use one that only a few will recognize as suspicious, and ideally, use several scenarios, some of which are legit.

2. Click a photo of a person to listen to a narrator read a script about the importance of ethics.

Replacement: You could replace this with more scenario decisions like the first one, demonstrating the importance of ethics. You could show a scene, have the learner pick the likely result, and in the feedback emphasize the points you want to make. Some scenes could include an unethical manager who damages team morale or a legal but potentially unethical-seeming action that results in a client firing your company. Again, you want to keep it subtle and include scenarios that are ethical, to demonstrate the importance of recognizing  potential problems in gray areas.

3. Drag the word “ethical” to the correct definition.

Replacement: Do your learners have to define “ethical” on the job, or do they have to recognize and avoid potentially unethical behavior? I’d argue for the latter and would suggest deleting this activity.

If you firmly believe with good reason that there are adults employed by your company who can’t define the term “ethical” and that this lack of understanding impairs them so much that they couldn’t recognize unethical behavior, then you could at least give them interestingly shaded definitions to choose from. For example, the potential definitions of “ethical” could include:

• “Ethical behavior is behavior that doesn’t hurt anyone.”
• “Ethical behavior is behavior that conforms to our Policy on Ethics.”
• “Ethical behavior is behavior doesn’t break any of the laws in the countries in which our company has a presence.”

Doesn’t this take more time?

Yes, it usually takes longer to design thought-provoking interactions. However, you aren’t necessarily adding a lot of work, because well-designed interactions can replace boring presentations.

For example, we replaced the narrated script that told about the importance of ethics with a handful of decision-making activities that showed the importance. Not only are the activities more engaging, they’re probably more memorable, and they’ve spared us the hassle of recording a presentation.

The take-away

A quick way to change simple clicking to a more challenging interaction is to ask yourself, “What do learners have to do on the job with this information?” or “What might be the real-world consequences of not understanding this?” Then you can design a subtle, challenging decision-making activity that simulates those real-world tasks or consequences.