How to Transform Static Content into Interactive Knowledge Checks

Are you looking to build more interactive e-learning? Something that moves your courses beyond click-and-read slideshows? One of the single best ways to begin creating more interactive courses—without disrupting your project’s timeline, client’s budget, or learners’ expectations—is to reframe your existing static content into interactive knowledge checks.

Storyline’s Convert to Freeform option offers six super easy ways to transform slide content into interactive slides. The process is the same for each, so it’s really up to you to choose the interaction type that best suits your new question. Let’s look at three ways we can rework the same text-and-bullets slide using Storyline’s Pick One, Drag-and-Drop, and Text Entry features.

In these examples, the key is to provide the context for the activities without redesigning our course or increasing development time. Because we’re working with existing content, the context for the activity is already in place; we just need to reframe the content into a meaningful question.

Pick One

Pick One questions have only one right answer. Unlike multiple choice questions (yawn!) that rely on radio buttons, Pick One questions allow us to use existing text, graphics, and pictures as viable choices, giving our learners a more visible learning activity.

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Bonus: You don’t have to stop at one question. Once your duplicated slide is converted to a free-form interaction, you can continue duplicating the slide and changing the question and correct answers. This is a great option for designing drill-and-practice activities like flash cards and test preparation.

Drag-and-Drop

Drag-and-drop is another option for reframing content into a knowledge check. We just told our learners about each branch and what it does. Now, we can create a matching activity that asks learners to match the responsibilities to the correct branch of government.

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Text Entry

Fill-in-the-blank questions are another way to ask learners to recall what they just learned or read in an earlier slide.

This type of activity works well because we can remove one or more words from our content slide and ask learners to type in the missing words.

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What do you think?

This is easy, right? Seems like a good first step toward moving click-and-read courses into something more interactive. And, even though it’s a small shift, it engages your learner on the content you just presented. So tell us what you think—leave a comment below, start a thread in E-Learning Heroes, or try out your new skills in our Weekly Challenge. We want to hear from you!