“Long time ago, in a distant galaxy…”

As soon as you hear or read this, your expectations rise, and you hope for a grand story of massive proportions to unfold.

Great stories inspire people to take action, change their minds, and do business. Simply put, stories pique people’s interest in the topic at hand. People are captured and moved by stories, which is why they are such an effective tool for customized eLearning design.

Stories, whether told orally, visually, or in written form, engage learners’ hearts and minds, prompting them to think and respond in interesting ways. Stories do not need to be lengthy and intricate to serve their purpose. Short scenarios can entice learners and aid comprehension by assisting them in grasping and remembering information and prompting them to act.

Stories can benefit all learning modes, from digital learning to instructor-led classroom training. Though it is less commonly used in eLearning, storytelling can generate powerful, engaging experiences that lead to sticky learning.

This article will highlight why storytelling is essential in custom eLearning design. Let’s dive right in:

Why Storytelling Is Important For Custom eLearning Design

1. Storytelling Aids Learners In Retaining The Information

One of the most common problems that trainers encounter is learners forgetting the majority of what they’ve learned in a few days. Research shows that people forget nearly half of what they learn in just one hour—a truly tragic outcome for corporate training.

Using storytelling in customized eLearning design can help combat this problem. Engaging and relatable stories can significantly improve the brain’s neural activity. When a learner begins to engage with the content to understand it, the likelihood of forgetting that information decreases dramatically.

2. Learning Through Stories Improves Employee Performance

Did you know that using storytelling in eLearning to train your employees can improve their overall performance? But how?

Employee performance is highly dependent on the employee’s motivation and interest in the tasks. An eLearning course with a compelling narrative tends to increase their engagement and interest. This, coupled with improved brain function, helps learners remember what they’ve learned and serves as a motivator for them to perform well.

3. Interactive Storytelling Personalizes Learning Experiences

An interactive storytelling narrative, by definition, places the learner in the middle of the learning activity, making them fully accountable for how the story unfolds. As a result, learning outcomes vary subtly depending on the learner’s prior knowledge, skills, and behavioral patterns. Hence, when designing custom eLearning courses, personalization should be your top priority.

For example, you can add interactive design elements like branching scenarios to establish the narrative and guide it toward a specific learning goal. Such techniques allow learners to make various decisions, each of which can have a different outcome.

The learners become more invested in the story as a result of their actions. This further piques their interest and participation, motivating them to ensure course completion. In other words, the greater the interactivity in the storytelling, the greater the success of eLearning.

4. Complex And Abstract Concepts Are Simplified

Anecdotal stories and analogies in stories make it a lot easier to describe complicated and abstract concepts to your learners. The scenarios you establish within a story do much more than instruct. They provide learners with a road map by illustrating how they should act in various situations.

For example, using visual metaphors to tell a story is a helpful technique for helping people learn. Visual metaphors take abstract ideas and translate them into tangible, understandable graphical forms. They uncover hidden connections and identify underlying trends and patterns.

How Can Stories Be Worked Into Custom Elearning Design?

We’ve discussed why stories are essential in eLearning. However, the benefits may be diminished if that story is reduced to a large chunk of text on a presentation slide. Therefore, you will have to find exciting ways to tell a story. You can experiment with the approaches listed below.

1. A Comic Strip

Comics engage learners visually because the creative images immerse them in the comic’s environment and clearly communicate the characters’ emotions. Short bursts of dialogue can help the plot move quickly. In addition, the approach’s novelty aids in attracting attention.

2. Interactive Timeline

A timeline template can convey a series of events and consequences when a story is told from a single point of view (i.e., without dialogue). An interactive timeline can pique learners’ interest with appealing visuals and give them a hands-on way to advance the story.

3. Narrative Audio

The best storyteller is an expert who has firsthand knowledge of the event or is particularly passionate about delivering its message. Narrative audio can be a great way to tell a story to your learners. The associated emotion and emphasis can be conveyed effectively via an audio recording by an expert.

4. Video

Video can enhance the benefits offered by audio. A visual of the person narrating the story enables learners to comprehend nonverbal expressions, which they may appreciate, mainly if they are covering a large amount of information.

5. Multisensory Lessons

Interactive stories combine all forms of storytelling—text, graphics, audio, music, and video (e.g., visual, auditory, tactile, and kinetic)—to simultaneously stimulate multiple senses. Multisensory stories aid learning by engaging both sides of the brain. The left side concentrates on the story’s details, while the multisensory components stimulate the right side.

Conclusion

A story does not necessarily need traditional storytelling elements (such as a hero and a villain), but it should be something to which the learners can relate. And when you are training a sizable group of learners, the best way to connect with everyone is to identify common ground in their perceptions and experiences.

This means that the eLearning courses will not be inspired by famous story writers like Dan Brown, J.K. Rowling, or J.R.R. Tolkien. However, you can create more powerful and effective custom eLearning courses by leveraging the incredible power of storytelling.

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