#interactive content development

Interactive content, in simplest of terms, is self-paced learner-dependent live content. It’s an enhanced mode of educating users by engaging them through the use of interesting tasks with an aim to impart learning. Such content can dynamically change with the input from the user and delivers real-time, personalized results. The point of interactive content is minimal text and more multimedia (images/audio/video/3D models) inclusion for continued user attention and positive feedback. Interactive content through its rich media, encourages user engagement, allowing them to freely interact and learn more effectively than traditional reading. Allowing self-paced learning, interactive content also features real-time appropriate feedback mechanism. Although interactive content could be delivered in a lot of ways, there are some well-defined, standard approaches to engage students.

Types of Interactive Content

Assessments:     Formal     formative or summative questions that require learner input in the form of     answers. Such content is useful in assessing whether the students have     learned the topic well and are ready to proceed to the subsequent     subject/level. Modern techniques of assessment follow the concept of     adaptive learning, which assesses learners’ responses and measures     progress to customize the assessment questions. 

Interactive     Learning Resources: Compact, modular learning units that are designed for electronic     USE & delivery of knowledge to learners, such as courseware, widgets,     calculators, templates, etc.

Educational     Games: Digital content solutions supporting learning through fun activities     that engage participants in learning and understanding concepts through     the medium of games. Educational games help increase student engagement     and motivation with the use of media-rich gaming/gamification concepts     such as challenges, levels, complexity pyramids, rewards and badges etc.     which keeps the spirit of healthy competition and helps in improving     learning efficacy.

Simulations     and Virtual Labs: A virtual lab is a simulated environment, wherein different     scenarios that are not usually available to learners in real life can be     virtually explored. These complex learning resources are exploratory in     nature, allowing learners to engage in different ways, assess the outcome     to make hypothesis and predictions, thereby enabling self-paced learning.     They can be designed for compatibility with learning standards, such as     Common Core, NGSS, and others as per the product needs.

Interactive Animations: Media     rich animated videos involving user interactions in-between to answer     questions, make choices, make predictions etc. help in engaged user     experience. These can be accessed on multiple platforms and can be created     across content (subjects, grades etc.)

The Need

Understanding the expected outcome is crucial to interactive content development. Designing and developing interactive content for implementation across various platforms has little to no reference in terms of a standardized plan of action. Therefore, it’s important to envision the deliverable content along with its method of delivery. For an enhanced User experience, having a clear plan of action is imperative in deciding the overall design outline of the content. This can be achieved by knowing the requirement, the complexity of the content design and the desired medium of delivery.

Key Factors for Developing Interactive Content for Mobile Platforms

Cross-Environment Compatibility

Learners have access to multiple devices  these days like mobile phones, tablets, laptops or desktops. Each device is subject to regular updates in both hardware and software which leads us to an important requirement – cross-environment compatibility for the easy access of interactive content.

Cross-environment compatibility follows design uniformity while preserving the usability across different devices, such as mobile phones, tablets, desktops across varied operating systems and hardware configurations. Below are few ways to achieve this:

Use cross-environment libraries to ensure uniformity of behavior. This enables designing content for all environments, screen sizes, aspect ratios, and responsive in behaviour for a seamless and consistent user experience     throughout.

Use     programming languages that are compatible across multiple environments to     create content with the same functional behavior.

Inclusion of lighter components, such as colored background gradients more than      static images to avoid performance issues on devices with low-end     hardware or outdated operating systems.

Catering     to User Interactions: Gestures vs. Clicks

The content displayed on a smartphone/tablet or desktop may be similar, but the way it interacts with the user is entirely different. Instead of clicks and scrolls, the actions are converted to gestures, such as touch, tap, pinch zoom, and swipe. Thus, incorporation of components that lets users interact with the device according to its in-built features needs to be done. It requires a thorough UX design along with programming an additional code to respond to gestures, thereby enhancing the convenience and usability of interactive content across multiple mobile devices.

Responsive     Design

Responsive design is an approach to design any content for it to be viewed in response to the size of the screen one is viewing with. To ensure usability of content across different devices with varied sizes and orientations, responsive design offers the support for allowing seamless viewing experience for the same content, resulting in user satisfaction.

Fluid design structure/grids, flexible images and stylesheet (CSS) media queries, work hand-in-hand to enable content restructure/re-flow as per the available screen size across all types of hardware (smartphones, tablets, desktops or laptops). Responsive design is an example of user interface plasticity. Nearly all organization with digital content solutions and educational content development services focuses on design-born responsive solutions

Content     Availability – Online and Offline

Interactive content is intended to be available anytime from anywhere, which is why it is primarily distributed online. To prevent this strength from transforming into a weakness, it is important to make the content available in offline mode, too. For learners without access to a steady internet connection, it would, quite literally, prevent them from learning. A careful back-end implementation to package these components as downloadable (standalone) learning objects can easily overcome this hurdle.

Personalized     Interactive Content for Self-Paced Learning

Owing to the several differences in learners’ approach & ability to learn, there’s a possibility of loss of knowledge if an educator uses standardized (or set) content. Therefore, it’s important for an educator to design content that can be personalized keeping the specific needs of learners in mind, which would eventually promote self-paced learning.

With personalization, it becomes mandatory to understand the usage medium for learning, hence comes the need of designing interactive content for varied platforms (mobile, tablet, desktops etc.) to promote user engagement and enhanced learning experience. This will help the learner develop a habit of learning at their own comfortable pace, while optimizing the advantage of personalized interactive content.

Placing utmost importance on the learner, changes the game. Incorporating feedback and enhancing the user experience accordingly, makes interactive mobile content the future of delivery. Such a content delivery mechanism thrives on personalized output, taking the user input into account before letting the learner proceed on to the next stage. This adaptive learning mechanism helps the learner progresses in a smarter way with content configuring itself as per learner’s pace and ability based on their responses.

Over the past few years, teaching and learning have changed drastically. Whereas, earlier the method was of learning only what the teacher taught with the help of textbooks. The revolution of change has come about with the evolution of the internet and innovations to support digital learning with the help of interactive content. Now, not only can you study on your computer, you can study or your tablet, and even your phone.

The trend now is to study everything online and find various course materials to support that learning. One can’t make do with just the use of textbooks, and multiple teaching materials are required to study. They are getting more involved with interactive content development to make content crisp, simple and interactive. Interactive content development helps in the accessibility of content, by choosing the format the learner wants to use.  The learner can choose to watch a video, read about the subject, and even perform an experiment online rather than having to go to a physical lab. Virtual Labs are the new wave in learning and are being used widely.

Today eLearning is playing a major role in education.  There are many players in the education sector who are using blended learning, which entails print and online courses for effective learning. They have adopted interactive content development to make courses resonate with a broad range of audiences.

Interactive content development enables learners to interact with data and draw meaningful conclusions. It encapsulates multiple learning mediums such as games, assessments, diagrams that enable the learner to engage with the content on-the-go.

As a content developer, you need to develop courses that are meet the end results of information absorption. Each course should be divided in difficulty levels followed by assessments, and some interactive learning, which keeps the students engaged. The courses and assessments should be followed by case studies that the students can relate to. The learner should feel confident in advancing to the next level once they have completed a chapter or a module. Assessments, self-evaluation, and feedback in online courses are strong pillars in learning and development. Self-evaluation and self-analysis are the best ways to make learners realize their strengths.