Summary
The blog post provides insights into developing and delivering interactive lessons for higher education. It discusses the importance of engagement, active learning, and student-centered approaches in creating impactful educational experiences. The post offers practical tips and strategies for incorporating interactive elements such as multimedia, discussions, and assessments into lessons.
The era of static online courses that treat their learners as passive information absorbers are long gone! No more are people bound by the traditional digital methodologies that rely on text, images, audio, videos, and other similar multimedia formats. With the emergence of artificial intelligence, augmented reality, and a multitude of highly advanced technologies, learners’ expectations have grown beyond measure. Students are now looking for professional, customized tools that can help them streamline their competencies, sharpen their cognitive skills, and polish their problem-solving abilities.
The best way to facilitate critical thinking, strengthen decision-making, and enable participative learning is an interactive lesson.
What Are Interactive Lessons?
In simple words, interactive lessons are educational lessons based on learners’ active involvement, collaboration, and participation. These lessons utilize the power of diverse interactive elements like animations, live images, digital stories, simulations, gamification, and real-life scenarios, by carefully embedding them within the structure of the course content. Such elements are used to deliver an immersive and engaging experience that caters to different levels of learning complexity. At present, interactive lessons are used by educational institutions across the world to connect with learners in a meaningful way.
How to Develop Interactive Lessons for Students?
Embed Interactive Elements
Interactive lessons are primarily defined by the use of synergetic elements that work towards eliciting a response from the learner. They ensure that a student does not merely sit through a lesson with no participation whatsoever. Instead, students are encouraged to take actions such as answering a quiz, participating in polls, watching learning videos, etc.
Include 360 Degree Media
Imagine that you are trying to explain the geographical location of a particular place to your students. Wouldn’t it be easier if you could virtually transport them to the said place? This is precisely the kind of immersive experience that 360-degree media provides. With its interactive, virtual videos, it helps students take complete control of their learning environment.
Devise Real-Life Scenarios
The best way to keep learners hooked on a specific module is by giving them the choice to change its course. As bizarre as it sounds, doing so can help you retain the absolute attention of your learners! Real-life scenarios that branch out into choices can lend your students the ability to strengthen their analytical skills while learning what they need.
Create Simulated Environments
One of the greatest benefits of providing interactive lessons is that these lessons allow the creation of simulated environments. Simulation enables learners to make as many mistakes as they want until they grasp their new skills. It also permits them to be observed in a controlled manner by educators, who can intervene when required.
Add Digital Stories
Using digital stories as a medium to connect with learners will work wonders in evoking the right kind of emotions in them. Digital storytelling, due to the power of its sheer creativity, harbors the innate potential to engage learners meaningfully.
How to Deliver Interactive Lessons to Students?
Warm Up to the Lesson
Quite like you would do with a regular course, start by warming up to both the class and the lesson. Ask your students some basic questions related to the topic and check whether they know enough about the course they are going to study. Gauge their level of understanding and awareness.
Introduce New Topics
Once this is done, start simply introducing new topics. Embed images or videos into your lesson and engage your learners with what they see. You can also experiment with a guided simulation at this stage. However, make sure that your learners are constantly engaged.
Gather Learner Response
Next up, start gathering the first responses to your lesson so that you can make the course even more interactive than it currently is. Use your slides to ask a variety of questions and record the answers you obtain in a response sheet. Utilize these sheets to make instant course corrections.
Track, Assess & Review
With interactive lessons, the best way to track, assess, and review is to prepare a live dashboard. Standardize each facet you want to measure and begin monitoring the progress of every student separately. Doing so will help you ascertain that you’ve covered all possible learning grounds.
To Sum Up
With changing times, the need, importance, and relevance of interactive lessons – especially in higher education – have increased manifold. Access to technology has made it rather easy for colleges and universities to develop, disseminate, and deliver online lessons that are immersive, valuable, and wholesome in their own right. So much so that the eLearning market is projected to grow to almost $325 billion by 2025!
In such a transformative scenario, the only way for educational institutions to survive is by creating a set of technically proficient and creatively sound interactive lessons that harbor the ability to enrich content, enhance retention, save costs and thus make the learning process much more fun.
So, what are you waiting for? Follow the aforementioned tips, tactics, and techniques to successfully develop and deliver interactive e-lessons now!
