For eLearning professionals, making an online course engaging is a constant challenge. One of the main mistakes not to make is to create completely static content as the risk of boring students could increase enormously.

Making a course more dynamic does not mean simply randomly inserting interactive elements into it. This process, in fact, must be done in a balanced and useful way to stimulate the learning process. How to transform an eLearning content that is too static?

1. Preview slides

The slides of each lesson can be well constructed in terms of content, but sometimes they can be too static. There are several ways to make them more dynamic. One of the simplest is to offer a preview of previous and subsequent slides through the use of tabs. The student can go back to remember previous concepts or go forward to find out what awaits them.

2. Avoid paragraphs that are too long

On a visual level, being confronted with pages full of text without any subdivision can create a sense of chaos and make even the most involved student feel overwhelmed. For this reason, to make the content visually and practically more dynamic and usable, it is preferable to separate it into shorter paragraphs, if not directly divide it into several slides or pages.

3. "Hide" part of the content

While the ability to split content across multiple slides/pages is a useful option in many cases, in others it can considerably lengthen the course extension, causing confusion in navigation. For this reason, to take up less space and make the content more interactive you can use the "hover-and-reveal" option, i.e. the possibility to hover the mouse over a certain element to discover new and additional text and information on the subject.

4. Using the three main interactions

When we talk about interactivity in the field of eLearning, we take into consideration three types of models that allow students to have control over the use of the content:

• Click: the most classic option, which is to click on an interactive element to access another (text, video, audio, infographic, etc.);
• Hover-and-reveal: as we have already said, hover-and-reveal is fundamental for hiding information to be revealed with the simple passage of the mouse;
• Drag: in this case, the interaction takes place by clicking on an element and dragging it to another area of the page in order to discover new content or move on to the following lesson.

5. Give control to students

Through these small strategies that allow you to discover content in small doses, the lesson becomes an interaction in which students choose the order in which to read the information. In this way, the study turns into an active process, no longer a passive one: you need to interact with the course to choose a pattern and pace of study.

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