Quality content. Polished design. Easy navigability. Even if these three ingredients are important in order to make your learning simulations successful, they are nothing without interactivity. While it seems obvious, there are still so many training managers out there doing it the old way: Delivering content, even if valuable, without inserting any interactions. This kind of training is dead. Nowadays, you have to leverage options provided by new interactive training software, in order to make your serious games engaging. In this article, we are going to discuss 8 advantages of these kind of tools, and how you can use them to their full potential.
Why You Should Integrate An Interactive Training Software In Your Learning Strategy
Interactivity. This is the factor you should be focusing on during your serious game development. While this part is often overlooked by training managers, this is the most important one.
Think about it for a second. Imagine that you have created the best product for your market, but your salesforce is boredom itself. Do you think that you are still going to make sales? Despite your good product, chances are you will not. Do you know why? Well, because your product will not have any exposure, just because your salesforce did not convince their audience to have a look at it.
The same phenomenon applies in training. A great serious game without interactivity will not get you anywhere. Your learners will not engage, they will not retain the information properly, and they will get bored within the first 5 minutes of yourlearning simulation.
In this article, we are going to show you 8 advantages of integrating an interactive training software in your learning strategy, and how it will skyrocket your results to the next level.
1. Enhance Exploration.
If you want your serious game to be fully interactive, it is important to give to your learners the opportunity to explore their environment. This can be done effectively only by using an interactive training software. Authoring tools like ITyStudio, for instance, have the feature to setup interactive maps into the learning simulations you create. This way, attendees can explore the training at their own taste.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_NpUEOBjWTM
However, that is not all. An interactive training software allows you to go beyond. You could, for instance, create stories that learners could interact with, integrate visual components that make the topic more eye-catching, or even encourage them to explore the module by hyper-linking to other pages that may be of interest.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7YrSMAVQHeI
All of these key elements will enable you to create interactive serious games that enhance learners’ engagement and keep them coming back for more knowledge and information.
2. Setup Engaging Scenarios.
Your most powerful weapon to engage learners is to develop reality-based scenarios. Indeed, by inserting real life examples and problems into your serious games, you will have the chance to show to your learners that the knowledge included in the training simulation can be used in their daily work life. Fortunately, an interactive training software can help you doing so. Serious game development has given us the opportunity to put knowledge into action. Before, with classical eLearning modules, there was no interaction. Learners were consuming information, without applying it. Thanks to serious games, this is now different. Attendees can actually live an immersive experience, and put the knowledge they learnt during theirlearning simulation into practice.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Npyc2-wbRIg
3. Assess Learners’ Performance Spontaneously.
With classical authoring tools, you have basically one way to assess your learners’ performance: Quizzes. While this medium can be good to evaluate the effectiveness of the online training, it can be improved. By using an interactive training software, you can assess your learners’ performance in real time, and spontaneously. This is possible thanks to branching scenarios. Serious games authoring tools such as ITyStudio have this nice feature in place.
Are you wondering how it works? Basically, the training software takes into account every single answer provided by the learner, and associate them with evaluation criteria. For instance, if during a negotiation, the learner chooses not to ask questions to his prospect, he would have a bad score on the evaluation criterion “Empathy”.
4. Tap Into Learners’ Emotions Thanks To Your Interactive Training Software.
When it comes to information and skill retention, emotions are a great vehicle to choose. Be careful though, you should not necessarily go for “shock value”. This might only serve to pull the attention away from the core content. For instance, you could leverage your reality-based scenario, and include an emotional video or image into it. Something that would allow the learner to personally relate to the subject. This could be a real event in which your organization participates. You could say something like: “if you were in this situation, what would you do?”. These kind of scenarios are really trendy nowadays. By doing so, learners will feel concerned, get emotional, and will engage in the serious game. To integrate these pieces of content in your scenarios, you will need an interactive training software.
5. Leverage Your Interactive Training Software Graphics.
If you want to engage your attendees, a very important factor to take into account is the graphical environment of your learning simulations. Think about it. How could your learners engage in the training if they do not like what they see? Before, this point was a real hustle: you had to hire a team of web designers to create your content. You also had to take care of the integration, etc. Now that we entered theinteractive training software era, this step is made easy. For instance, the serious game authoring tool ITyStudio has ready-made library of content available. By leveraging this content, setting up a professional, well rounded graphical environment has never been easier. All you have to do is clicking on the graphics that you want to implement, and you are done with it.
6. Increase Your Learners’ Retention.
Information retention is only the result of all the other elements mentioned previously. Indeed, an interactive training software will help you strengthening your attendee’s retention. By providing them with nice graphics, by giving them the chance to interact with their environment, by exposing them to reality-based scenarios, theironline training can only be productive and appreciated. Simply put, if we had to summarize this point: an interactive training software will lead to more results. Employees will actually better retain and apply the information, resulting in an overall progress of the organization’s skills.
7. Prevent Employees From Boredom.
By putting interactivity into your learning simulations, you are preventing your learners’ from your biggest opponent: Boredom. The time for endless PowerPoint transcription is over. Now, learners are at the core of the online training. They can interact with their environment. They can make decisions. They can put the knowledge transmitted into action. That is what an interactive training software like ITyStudio is all about.
8. Make Serious Games Valuable And Fun.
Valuable or fun? Before, it was complicated to insert both in online training. Traditional tools such as PowerPoint only enabled you to convey information. But it was nearly impossible to add a funny touch to the content. Now, with an interactive training software, you can easily integrate both. For instance, you could insert a joke into a dialogue between two characters. If done properly, this could engage learners’ even more, and make them realize that their answer was good or bad (based on the context of the joke).
Ready To Integrate An Interactive Training Software For Your Learners? Take Action!
In this article, we shared with you 8 great advantages of integrating an interactive training software in your learning strategy.
If you are interested in this kind of solutions, you should definitely give ITyStudio a try!
This serious games authoring tool contains all the features needed to embrace the advantages above.
It is easy to use, it is engaging, and, best of all: you can try it for free!
Ready to go to the next level? Claim your 30-day free trial here.
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