Interactivity in elearning courses

A client asked for more interactive elements in a course. So we added them.

Drag and drop activities, branching scenarios, clickable hotspots, hours of the stuff. It looked fantastic in the demo. The client loved it. The satisfaction scores that came back afterwards were genuinely good.

For a while, I thought that was the whole story.

What the data actually said

Then we looked at the usage data. Not the survey. Not the feedback form. The actual data of what students clicked on and when.

Turns out most of them didn’t touch the interactive content at all.

They skipped straight past it and went to the assessments. Not because they were lazy or didn’t care. They just wanted to know exactly what they needed to complete the task in front of them. The hours of interactive material we’d built sat there, mostly untouched, while students went hunting for the shortest path to done.

Was there any point building it?

In this case, honestly, not really.

Water always finds the easiest way down

Here’s the thing about people trying to finish a course. They behave a lot like water running down a hill. They don’t care how scenic the path is. They don’t stop to admire the drag and drop activity you spent three weeks building. They find the fastest, most direct route to the bottom, and they take it every time.

We could have forced them through the interactive content to unlock the assessment. Made it compulsory. Blocked the shortcut.

But what would that actually achieve? Ticking a box that says “completed” isn’t the same as someone actually learning something. It just means we got better at building fences.

So what’s interactivity actually for?

This is the question I keep coming back to, and I don’t think I have a clean answer yet.

Sometimes we build interactivity because it genuinely helps someone practise a skill they need. Sometimes we build it because it makes the course feel modern, or because it’s easier to sell in a pitch meeting than “here’s a well written page of text.” I’ll be honest, I’ve been guilty of building for the demo, not for the student sitting at their kitchen table at 11pm trying to get this done before bed.

Satisfaction scores measure how people felt about the experience. Completion and usage data measures what they actually did. Those two things are not the same thing, and if you only ever look at one of them, you’re only getting half the picture.

Before you build the next interactive element

A few questions worth asking before adding interactivity to a course, based purely on what I wish I’d asked earlier:

What specific skill or decision does this interaction actually practise?
If a student skipped this entirely, would they be worse off in the assessment?
Are we building this because learners need it, or because it looks good in a stakeholder meeting?
What does the usage data from a similar course already tell us?
Is there a simpler, less time-consuming way to achieve the same learning outcome?

None of these questions are complicated. But they’re easy to skip when a client is excited and a deadline is close.

The real lesson

More study probably does need to be done on where interactivity genuinely helps and where it’s just decoration. I don’t think anyone has a complete answer yet, and I’m not going to pretend I do.

What I do know is this. Satisfaction scores will tell you what people wanted to say. Usage data will tell you what they actually did. When those two disagree, believe the data.

Build for what people do, not for what looks good in the pitch.

What’s your experience been? Have you seen interactive content genuinely lift outcomes, or does it usually end up like ours, built with the best intentions and quietly skipped?

Interactivity in elearning courses

Why More Interactivity Doesn’t Make a Better Course