Making Linear Content Interactive & Engaging: A Conversation with Tom Kuhlmann

CommLab Podcast with Tom Kuhlmann

Sherna Varayath 0:11
Hey champions, welcome back to the eLearning Champion Podcast, where we discover strategies, trends, and triumphs shaping the world of digital learning. In today's episode we are looking at a challenge many of us face, how to take linear or click and read content and make it interactive and engaging. I am absolutely thrilled to introduce you to our guest for today, Tom Kuhlman. Hi, Tom.

Tom Kuhlmann 0:49
Hi, how's it going?

Sherna Varayath 0:52
Doing well, thank you. Tom is the Chief Learning Architect at Articulate, a terrific ambassador for eLearning and Rapid eLearning development tools. Tom's advice is highly recommended to peers and enthusiasts alike. Before we dive in, make sure you're a true eLearning champion by hitting that follow button from wherever you're listening to us from. All right, let's get started.
Tom, what do you see as the biggest challenge for eLearning developers when building interactive courses, and how can they overcome it?

Tom Kuhlmann 1:35
I think the biggest challenge is, a lot of people who end up in eLearning may not always be trained instructional designers, so I think they tend to be. What I see is this path that people take is they were subject matter experts who were good at explaining things and somehow they made their way into training. Then somewhere in their career, they became eLearning developers. So I think one challenge is people don't necessarily always have the skills to translate their face to face instruction with instructional design that's appropriate for eLearning. I think another one that I think is real for most people is the time it takes to build more engaging and effective eLearning. It's a lot easier to take 100 PowerPoint slides and drop that into an eLearning course and add a quiz. That's pretty simple. To be honest, a lot of organizations are happy with that. So I think time, budget are limiting. If we really step into engaging training, I think a lot of people just don't really know the difference between effective interactivity and building courses that encapsulate that.
In terms of how to overcome that. Today you don't need to go. I know there's a lot of people who will dispute this. You don't necessarily need to go to college to learn about instructional design. If you're self-motivated, there's plenty of blogs, plenty of YouTube videos, plenty of books. There's a lot of resources you're going to get, probably what you would get in a university. So I would think the first thing is to upskill yourself, learn more about instructional design and all those things. Going to school, getting a certificate or something, that's obviously a good idea, but that shouldn't be a barrier to you.

Then the other thing I think is on getting to a point where you can step away from the linear content. If you didn't do any training or anything like that, the easiest thing is think how do I reframe my content? Normally it's information, information, information, which I think is the big challenge. How do I make it relevant for the learner? So what are the real world scenarios and expectation around the content?
And start from there and then start building your content out. We'll talk more about that as we go through the conversation.

Sherna Varayath 4:12
Yes, OK. Makes sense. So for someone new to creating interactive eLearning, what are the first steps you would recommend they take to get started?

Tom Kuhlmann 4:24
Yeah, like I was saying, I think the first step is to think about the objectives of the course and there's usually a real world context for that course, right? And so, how do I take the objectives and reframe it so it's relevant to the learners? I think that's the first thing. Always think about the relevance to the learner because then you're at the starting point to create a better learning experience.

I think the other part of that is to start to build on the relevant meaningful situation. I have what I call these little building blocks for interactive eLearning, they're just simple things to get you to think about things. One of them is relevant. So if I need to frame my content so it's relevant, that's the first building block. The other thing is we tend to push content out. You know, here's the information, here's the information, here's the information. And I think it's how do I get the learner to pull content in. So thinking about different mechanisms and one way it's really simple.
I throw you into a situation, you've got to make a decision, and you don't know anything. So you have to go look for information. Then you're going to pull content in rather than me pushing content out, and that exploration, the ability to go out and look for information that you think is meaningful, then decision making. So there are a few simple building blocks like that, like relevance. How do I get a person to pull content in? So they're looking for it, thinking about it because it forces them to think about what they think is most meaningful that they need to know to make decisions. The decision making is the key piece. So little building blocks like that, you can bring those together to build a good eLearning course, one that's a little bit more engaging.

Sherna Varayath 6:21
So you are known for simplifying complex concepts. Can you share a simplified approach to designing interactive eLearning experiences?

Tom Kuhlmann 6:32
Yeah, I go back to those building blocks. I developed simple models around the building blocks. So for example, back in the early days of rapid eLearning, when the opportunities to building interactive eLearning was a little bit limited, I had what I called the RSI model. It was basically just relevant situation, and then the decision making interaction. The idea was instead of giving you information, I would put you in a position where you'd have to make a decision now. I didn't care if you knew it or didn't know it. You would have to make a decision. And then once you’ve made your decision, you would get feedback based on the decision.

I was actually in London this last week at a conference, and somebody came up to the booth, was asking me the same thing, how do I create more engaging eLearning? And I say, well, put them in a situation where they have to make a decision. And don't worry if they don't know the information, just get them to make a decision because you want them to pull from their knowledge and make an educated guess, right? So I said, for example, I put her on the spot. I said tell me about the difference between a gas engine and an electric motor. So if you have a gas powered car and electric powered car, tell me a difference about the motors, or how they move. And she was like I don't really know anything about cars. Well, that's the point, you don't. But just take an educated guess, what do you know about gas engines or what do you know about electric motors? She was like, I don't really know anything. But then, if you start thinking about it, well, I can take an educated guess, maybe I know a little about electric motors, maybe I know a little about gas engines. If I don't, now it's the instructional designer in the context of building this course, you've got to make a decision. I'm going to work on what you currently know. You don't know anything. Now I'm going to give you opportunities to collect information. So instead of pushing it out, maybe I have an option in the course that says call the mechanic or go to Wikipedia. There's different ways you can then present the information and force them to build off what they know and pull in information they think is meaningful. And then they make decisions. And even if you didn't give them any information, you could still get them to make a decision, because it gets them to think about something, and then you give them the answer after they made the decision, and that would be the answer you would have in your click and read course. The only difference is you ask a question up front, they make a decision, right or wrong, and then you give them the answer. And then they would compare what they were thinking to what the right answer might have been. So you can do some simple things, in a simple way. Just get them in a position to test their understanding.

And then you could either give them information right after they make a decision, or give them opportunities to collect information. So it's a few simple building blocks like that that get you to build out your interactive capabilities in the course.

Sherna Varayath 9:38
Interesting. How do you distinguish between novel interactions and those that truly support the learning objectives?

Tom Kuhlmann 9:50
When I teach people about interactive eLearning, I say there's always 2 main parts. The first part is how do I get a person to touch the screen? So when you think about how you can interact on a screen and a lot of this has changed over the years with mobile devices, because how you can interact on a mobile device is a bit different than how you can interact, say on a laptop.

And then you have accessibility as the consideration. But generally when you look at how you can interact on the screen, you have 3 main things you can click. You can do some sort of mouse over, or you can do some sort of drag and drop, dragging, moving things around, and then you have a 4th element where you could add variables. Then what a person doing the course can change the content that they see, so you can have adaptive process.
Generally I have 3 ways you can touch the screen, so one of the things I always think about is, if you're normally doing a click and reveal type of interaction, why not change it to a hover interaction? Or why not change it to a drag type interaction? So that's getting them to touch the screen. The challenge there is, it is a novel experience, so you can do things that are really cool, but are irrelevant to the learning experience. You also have to think about accessibility. On a mobile device the hover doesn't work, so you have to accommodate that.

That's the first thing. You can do some really cool things, but those are just novel, and you don't want to overuse them. You want to make sure they fit in the context of the course. And then, the most critical thing is how's a person interacting with the content? And that goes back to the decision making, which if there were 2 main components to interactive eLearning, it's that the situation or whatever they're in is relevant, meaningful. So it's relevant to the work they do and the decisions they have to make.
And then you have decision making to test their understanding of the content, test them before you give them information, how much do you know or how much do you think you can work your way through it. Because that's really how life works at work, you don't come to work and start reading policies, you go to work, and something happens, and then you make a decision, and the company hopes that you make a decision that aligns itself to the company's policies. But you don't know, so you make a decision and then there's consequences to the decision you make. And that's how you should approach the interactive eLearning.

Sherna Varayath 12:26
What are some common pitfalls that can make an eLearning course boring and how can developers avoid them?

Tom Kuhlmann 12:40
Probably the most common pitfall is to take 50 PowerPoint slides, drop them in a course, create a quiz, and say you're done. That's easy, right? So that's the biggest pitfall. That's why a lot of eLearning courses are boring. But I will say always go back to the objective. A lot of times you have compliance training that's completely meaningless to the person's job. And you just have to go through it.
In that case, maybe the click and read course, even though it's not the most engaging course, might be the best way get the person in the course, give them the information, quiz them, get them back to work. For example, we have to take annual compliance training and some of it has to deal with insider trading. Well, we're not a publicly traded company. The insider trading is completely irrelevant to us, but it has to be part of the training we do.

And so why should you build out a big scenario and all this interactive decision making, if that's nothing that impacts our lives? So sometimes, a click and read course is the best thing, but I do think that becomes one of the biggest pitfalls. It's just easier to build that. And it's also the way we're used to. You go to school, there's somebody lecturing and giving you information. You're listening to the podcast, I'm giving you information. You go to YouTube, you're getting information, you go to blogs. So it's easy to get information pushed to you, and I think that's an easy way to build eLearning too. I think the other thing is an over reliance on the content and sometimes people over build. So they think oh, I have to build a scenario. Then they overbuild based on their content. I have nothing against like the Vyond videos and some of those things, because you can do some really nice things with that. But a lot of times I see people who aren't good designers go and take another tool and build these cartoons. But you really have to be a good script writer, right? And you have to know how to build that story, but you're just taking your boring 50 PowerPoint slides and then you just created a boring cartoon show. You've over built it, but you haven't really done a better job with the content or made it more engaging. So I think it's really kind of stepping back, looking at the content, being less focused on the content, creating a more learner centric experience, going back to how is it meaningful for the learner? Not just how do we get as much content out as possible.

Sherna Varayath 15:19
Right. Could you share an example of a successful interactive eLearning project you worked on and maybe let us know what made it effective?

Tom Kuhlmann 15:35
I could think of a couple of things. I'm working at Articulate now. I don't get to build courses the same way I did in previous companies. But a few years ago, LINGOs was a group that worked around learning and the NGOs, and they had this thing where they were trying to recruit people to build courses. And so, I wrote about it in the blog to encourage people to sign up, to build courses. And I thought, well, maybe we should do something too.

So then David, who works for me, David and I took one of the projects and it was kind of a boring project in the sense that they just had a lot of word documents and what they wanted to do was just teach people about different types of technology that they could use to communicate, and which technology they should choose. So they had like they don't call us, which was expensive, maybe you Skype or you know stuff like this was this was a few years ago.

So we looked at it and the content really wasn't that interesting in the grand scheme. It was really just a bunch of information. So what we did is, we thought, well, why don't we take the content, we can't overbuild the course. So we use that RSI structure, which was OK, let's give them a relevant situation. Here's something, you've got to contact headquarters for this reason. And then here's the technology available to you, which technology are you going to choose?
And then they chose the technology. And then regardless of what they chose, we told them this was the better choice, and why you wouldn't want to choose something else. So it's really just reframe the content a bit relevant to why they would choose technology. So we reframe the content. And then they had to choose something that really was kind of the types of decisions they made in real life. It didn't matter what they chose because essentially there was 3 choices. It was like one big button, right? They didn't know it, but it looked like you had 3 choices, but it really was just one big button. And then it went to the information that they would have thought it was, that they would have normally gotten in the slide, just like here's a situation you might run into, which technology would you use? And then when you made a choice, we say that was a good tech. This is why you should choose this technology, because it does this and this. The other thing we did in that course, going back to It was eLearning and it was technology. It was a bit dry, and a lot of these NGOs do work that's very impactful and meaningful to people around the world. We wanted to make sure that there was a connection between this dry information and what they were actually doing. So what we were trying to get into the course was that when you make a decision that saves money, this money can then be used to impact somebody's life. So in between each decision, we had little case study stories. They had these marketing videos. So we took those from their site, and did a little case study, stories to talk about, the decisions you make, impact kids who are living on the on a river, and boats would come by and do school and all that stuff. Well, if you saved money using Skype versus other expensive means to communicate, that money could then go and impact these people. So we try to tie what they were doing. It's a very simple approach. Basically it was the same content, but by reframing it with the decision and then giving them the information, and then connecting it to their mission, that worked out very well. It was received well in there and it was a reflection of what I was just talking about, reframing it so it's relevant, decision making, and then get some information or context, based on the decision you made.

Sherna Varayath 19:26
How do you balance the need for interactivity with the need for concise, focused learning content? What kind of requirements do you recommend using Rise and Storyline?

Tom Kuhlmann 20:21
In an eLearning course, you have to always look at the objective of the course. I always look at 2 things. It’s either an information-based course or a performance-based course. I always joke about this. You have sexual harassment training at work. It's not like your organization has 80% sexual harassers. Now we're going to do the training, and then we're going to decrease sexual harassment, right? That's not the way it works. Or you have ethics training because everybody's stealing, and we're going to do ethics training, and they're going to be better. You have ethics training to reinforce principles. Or you have sexual harassment training to reinforce principles. It's not necessarily meaning to change sexual harassment behavior or ethical behavior. Hopefully you don't have those problems at work in the first place, right? But it's training to remind you that this is what we have. There's a lot of compliance training. It's really about here are the regulations, the policies, and they're not really tied to performance, doesn't mean they couldn't be, but they're not. So that's like an information-based course. And then on the other side, you have performance-based courses.

You work in a call center, and you need to answer questions quickly, you need to solve these problems. Some of them say you've got to be done within 3 minutes. So how do I get a person to answer these things? You have a very different and measurable objective where you can say we want you to do this training, and the impact is that you've improve your performance. When you think of it that way, then you think about how do I build my course? if I'm building a lot of information or explainer type courses, I can keep the production very simple. It doesn't make a difference whether it's a simple click and read course with the quiz, or a dynamic scenario that takes more time to build. The objective is going to be met either way. But somewhere in there I have to figure out where do I spend my resources? When you start looking at the tools, Rise is really great. It's a form based tool, kind of like Legos. I select content blocks, I assemble them, and I build my course.

It is a form based tool, perfect for a lot of explainer type content. And it also works very well for simple interactive decision making content. You can combine blocks. For example Rise has a flash card block where you can have information on one side, you can click it and you get information on the other side. If you've structured the blocks, you can create a decision like the question block and then use the Flash card as question and answer type structure. So you can build some simple interactive decision making in Rise, but it's pretty straightforward and simple. If you want something much more robust then Storyline’s probably the better product just because in Storyline you have a custom environment. So it's not a form, it's a blank slide. You can build whatever you want. You have variables and a lot of the things that allow you to build the adaptive experience, you make decisions, we can analyze what you do, and send you on different paths, create a more robust branching scenarios and things like that. Both tools are good, Rise is really good for linear, simple content, also good for simple interactions. But if you want something more robust or more custom, then Storyline’s a better option.

Sherna Varayath 23:51
What advice would you give to developers who want to create more engaging and interactive eLearning experiences, but may not have extensive resources or budgets?

Tom Kuhlmann 24:06
I think that's part of the challenge for a lot of people. When I go to conferences and listen to these conference sessions or the experts in eLearning, a lot of them are consultants who build eLearning. So generally a consultant works with the client, so they get money and then they can build a course, right? And then because they get money, the company is saying, well, there are certain expectations we have. Are you going to meet those? But if you’re the eLearning developer within your organization, sometimes all you get is the tool. So like a lot of people, you're just going to get Storyline. That's it. See you later. And then it's a challenge for people to build their eLearning. So one thing I do is you want to really make it engaging, about the meaningful experience for the learner. So we do push content out, so it's very content centric. So the question is how do I make a course more learner centric? The easiest thing to do is step away from the content, think about how the learner's going to use the content. And even if you can't build a great interactive course, convert it to a case study. Frame the content like a case study. Even if it's still going to be linear, make it a case study. A story is more gripping. Years ago I worked for an organization. It was a company that worked with forest products, and they were very serious about no workplace injuries. And then one year they had 6 or 7 deaths pretty quickly. So, they shut the whole company down and everybody had to go through this training. Because they had to build the training quickly, they shut it down. Everyone had to go through the training. It didn't matter if you actually worked in a sawmill, or you worked in the forest cutting down trees. Everybody had to go through the same training. And what they did was they did a case study, but they looked at each accident and why the accident happened. And even though it's just case studies, just information, there wasn't dynamic scenarios and quizzes and all that stuff, the case studies were still very memorable. To this day I remember most of those case studies and what was funny was every single person who died, violated the company safety protocols. So the company already had safety mechanisms. But I think sometimes you just get used to doing work a certain way. But the power of a great story is something that you can use. So even if you have limited budget, you could take your content and reframe it as a case study. Matter of fact, one of my favorite features currently in RISE, for example, or Storyline 2. Articulate has the new AI assistant and you could take a block of text and then select the text and there's an option to create a scenario. And what it will do is it will rewrite your text more like a story. So instead of here's information, it'll be like imagine you're a manager, blah blah, blah, goes through that. So that even the AI just simply helps you take and convert your content into more of a relevant meaningful situation. One way for the course designer, if you're not the subject matter expert, one way to get those case studies is just go talk to the people who would take your courses and say we're building these courses. How would you use this information or if you didn't have the information, what would be the negative consequence? So then you can create a story like something happened. Let's investigate what happened.

So lo and behold, they weren't doing these things, and that becomes your training, right? But creating a meaningful perspective, the case study is the first step in that process.

Sherna Varayath 28:02
Wow, we have learnt so much today, and we have covered so much ground from making a learner centric experience to reframing content and some pitfalls to avoid. This brings us to the end of another insightful episode of the eLearning Champion Podcast and I hope you are walking away with some fresh ideas and actionable steps to make you're eLearning more engaging and interactive.

Thank you so much Tom for sharing your valuable insights and time. I am sure this episode will be one of our personal favorites.

If you found value in today's conversation, please do share this episode with your peers. We've got more fantastic episodes lined up for you, featuring incredible guests like Tom and tackling the topics that matter the most to you. We always love to hear from you. Please connect with us on your favorite social media platforms. Thank you so much for tuning in to the eLearning Champion podcast. Happy learning.