What’s the secret to happiness and also the way to motivate your e-Learners? It’s the flow theory, developed by Hungarian psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. “Flow” is the creative moment when a person is completely engaged in an activity for its own sake—exactly what you want for your learners when they’re taking your online training course.
“The best moments usually occur when a person’s body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile. Optimal experience is thus something we make happen,” writes Csikszentmihalyi in his book on using flow to achieve happiness: Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience.
If you help your learners achieve these moments throughout your course, they’ll be engaged, happy and eager to take that knowledge back to their jobs. Csikszentmihalyi identified many elements that contribute to achieving flow. Let’s take a look at a few, along with how you can apply these to the next e-Learning course you design.