I’m always looking to showcase a product’s most exciting aspects in my eLearning scripts, books and classes–something I call the "wow factor" or the "wow response."
One of the reasons I am still in the classroom teaching (I’ve been at it nearly 15 years) is that I get to see the "wow response" in action.
When creating lessons, try to keep in mind that your learners are busy. If you can’t get them excited about the product, or indicate clear "real world" advantages to using the product, your lessons are doomed.
I’ve written several books over the years. One of my first books was about Microsoft Word. One of Word’s most important, and least understood, features is style sheets.
When I was preparing to write the module on style sheets, I was mindful that creating lessons that didn’t make sense, or were out of order, would cause more harm than good. I was most concerned with the order of the processes necessary to create, use and edit styles. In the end, I created lessons that flowed like this:
- Use existing style sheets. (This quickly showed how powerful styles can be and got the "wow" response from students in class.)
- Create custom style sheets. (This showed how easy it is to create custom style sheets. It also gets a "wow" response.)
- Use custom style sheets.
- Edit style sheets. (Almost always gets a bunch of "wows.")
Beyond lessons that make sense and promote the "wow response," I’ve found that lessons that allow the learners to create a project are better than those that simply show how a feature works. With that in mind, I developed a project that would be used as the theme of the course. Then I made sure that I had the activities mapped out in a logical sequence that would support the project.
How did it all turn out? The first time I taught the Word class (it was a one-day, six hour course), I kept track of the "wow responses." Here’s the score:
- 14 "wows"
- 24 "now that’s cool"
- and countless "head nods."
You can say what you want about reactions like that… but I’ll sum it up with "WOW!"