What E-learning Has On Offer

One of the best things about e-learning is that it provides interactivity. Whether it's clicking on the correct answer to a question, clicking your mouse to animate a graphic, or practicing a mouse technique like drag and drop, you need to get involved to make e-learning work for you. This process of interactivity helps cement the facts you learn so that you retain more material.

Virtual Reality  

To illustrate how this works, let's look at a course for bartenders on applicable laws and regulations. This course might include video clips of real life situations followed by a game that asks you to make decisions about various issues that might come up for you as a bartender. The game uses virtual reality to help make the lesson more life-like. A sample situation might involve a customer who appears to be underage. If you make the wrong decision and decide to serve the underage customer, you might just see cops come busting into your bar to shut you down and arrest you for serving drinks to a minor. Seeing things depicted in lifelike fashion along with the process of role-playing helps to reinforce the lessons and make dry course material come alive.  

Various e-learning programs use different techniques to make the most of the interactivity that e-learning makes possible. For instance, one such program plays a video clip, which is followed by a window containing a multiple choice quiz. Each choice comes with an accompanying video clip so you can watch how the different choices play out.

Unparalleled Motivation

This kind of interactivity brings with it an unparalleled motivation to continue learning since the available elements make the intake of knowledge both fun and interesting. Students grasp concepts faster and retain them, too. In addition, e-learning is convenient, because you can do it anywhere and take it up or leave it as you please.

As you can see, e-learning provides interactivity, impetus to learn, and self-pacing. E-learning also gives software developers a chance to put into action the results of some 30 years of educational research. Such research has turned up some important elements that have a powerful effect on memory and retention. Here are some of the main points researchers have found have a major impact on memory:

*Employing patterns that work with the instinctive movements of the eyes

*Employing a variety of media

*Using sound and images in combinations

*Using images together with words

*Employing color, in particular certain color combinations that appear to stimulate the neural systems of the brain.