What reaction do you get when you announce a new eLearning course to employees? Do they stand up and cheer, excited for the learning opportunities and inspiration they will gain from the eLearning course you're offering? Or do they sigh, shoulders slumped as they slink away for yet another wasted day looking through slide after slide after slide?

Often, it's the latter reaction. Too many eLearning courses fail to motivate the learner because they fail to achieve the first goal of any learning. The learning must matter. The curriculum must clearly connect to learners and their lives before they will feel motivated to engage with it or feel inspired by it. 

Creating motivating and effective eLearning requires intentionality and attention to the learner. Here's how to get there:

1) Provide Choice

Autonomous adults want to feel like autonomous adults, capable of making complex and important decisions. Take away choice and you often take away motivation with it. After all, what's the point if the decisions have already been made? 

Effective eLearning provides the learner with various choices to make along the way catering to the learners' skills, background knowledge, culture, and abilities. "By giving students a choice, whether it is a big or small one, you give them a sense of control. You are teaching them to handle their own learning and planning" says Deborah Stipek, a professor at the Stanford Graduate School of Education.

Courses can provide choice through how learners demonstrate proficiency, how they apply skills, how they organize their learning or how they share their experiences with colleagues. 

2) Build Competency

The learning has to matter for it to motivate learners. Focusing on abstract concepts or skills they already have only led to frustration or boredom. Motivational eLearning helps build competency by challenging existing beliefs and actions, and testing out new ideas in old situations. 

Effective eLearning courses can build competency by engaging learners in case studies with different variables or through engaging and compelling stories that show the content in the context of real-world scenarios.  

3) Lead to Success

Students who experience success in eLearning internalize the intrinsic rewards of learning and feel even more motivated to keep on learning. Effective eLearning courses lead learners to authentic, successful moments through clear goals, hands-on activities and flexible assessments. 

Take care when designing course tasks, though. Tasks that are too easy condescend to students, and tasks that are too difficult leave learners behind. Students can easily become frustrated and demotivated when they feel like they’re struggling or not getting the recognition they think they deserve. Scaffolding is one instructional technique where the challenge level is gradually raised as students are capable of more complex tasks.  

4) Feed Creativity and Critical Thinking

Rote, boring tasks that require little thought do not serve to motivate students, leading to ineffective courses. To motivate learners, provide opportunities for students to engage in a deeper level of thinking.

To do this, courses can ask students to define tasks, integrate and synthesize ideas, or question and engage other learners.

5) Novel Content

It's a fact that change and novelty can stimulate interest and alertness. The new and unfamiliar can motivate learners as well as they encounter something different than expected rather than the same old slides and graphs. Novel is not the same as shocking, though. Instead, look for unconventional stories or current events where content could apply. Or, engage students through games and simulations that require learners to apply the information in unfamiliar contexts. 

6) Variety

Repeating the same set of online tasks for your courses is boring for learners. Instead, variety serves as a useful motivator by changing up patterns of thinking and behavior that limit innovation. A variety of tasks and ways of thinking actually builds new neural pathways that help the brain solve problems, remain engaged and stay motivated to learn even more.

Add variety through hands-on experiences, model making or even activities that occur outside of the eLearning environment. Knowing the eLearning course won't follow the same boring model, can motivate learners to engage deeper with the content. Here are 12 tips to spice up your eLearning courses the next time your creativity needs a jolt. 

Motivated learners are engaged learners, and engaged learners are successful learners. End the frowns and sighs by creating eLearning that matters to employees.