Flip the Script: Allow Failure to Drive Your eLearning Content

Ever since our school days, the learning and testing pattern has been the same. Study content…take test on content. Even in today’s age of eLearning, that’s still what we see. Present content…knowledge check…more content…final quiz. Guess what, it doesn’t always have to be that way. Depending on the material (and your users) sometimes it makes sense to put an assignment first, and then teach what they don’t know.

This article looks at a project we completed where we presented assignments to the learners before the lesson content. To accommodate multiple levels of learner, we provided support materials (on-demand resources and hints) as they tried to solve the assignments. Only when they failed questions were they presented with the “material” for the course. This gave learners a fresh course-taking experience and streamlined the process for those who understood the content going in. Let’s look at some of the concepts you can take away and use in your own courses.