Have you ever felt like your courses are packed with facts and figures, yet your learners just aren't retaining the information? Why do you think that is? Could it be that the way we're presenting information just isn't sticking?

Think about it: simply telling someone to be careful with cigarettes isn't nearly as memorable as sharing a vivid story about a cigarette that caused a massive house fire. Stories like these stick because they show real consequences, making the lesson much more impactful.

So, why do some eLearning designers rely solely on blocks of text and facts? It's a common mistake to think that more information equals better learning.

But what if we could achieve more by using less? What if we used powerful examples to guide our learners through the content?

In this article, we're diving into the transformative power of examples in eLearning. By integrating real-life stories and scenarios, we can give our learners a "compass" to navigate complex information.

Giving them examples is like giving learners a compass so they can actually find their way.

Here are some easy ways to start incorporating examples into your eLearning courses:

1) Screenshots

Screenshots are a fantastic tool for eLearning because they provide learners with real, concrete examples rather than abstract descriptions. This method of teaching is not only intuitive but also significantly enhances memory retention.

For instance, when teaching software usage, a textual description of where to click and what to do can be confusing. Instead, a screenshot showing the exact location of an icon or menu option can make the instructions crystal clear.

Learners can visually match what they see on their screens with what's shown in the screenshot, making the learning process much more straightforward and effective.

Consider a scenario where you need to train employees on a new project management tool. Instead of describing each step, you could use screenshots to illustrate:

How to set up a new project.
How to assign tasks to team members.
How to track project progress.
How to generate reports.

You could further enhance these screenshots by adding arrows or circles to highlight areas of interest, or text boxes to provide additional context. This not only makes the learning experience more engaging but also ensures that learners are not lost or overwhelmed by the interface.

2) Scenarios and Stories

Scenarios and stories are powerful tools in eLearning because they immerse learners in real-life situations, making the content relatable and memorable.

By crafting stories that reflect actual challenges, you allow learners to see the practical application of information in a context they can understand and empathize with.

For example, consider a course on sexual harassment. Instead of merely listing dos and don'ts, you can create a narrative around a new employee who receives inappropriate WhatsApp messages from her boss. This scenario not only illustrates the issue vividly but also prompts learners to think through the steps the employee could take to address the situation. Detailing the employee's thought process, the actions taken, and the consequences of those actions brings the lesson to life.

This storytelling approach is particularly effective because it engages learners emotionally and intellectually. They are not just passive recipients of information; they are actively involved in analyzing the scenario and considering their own responses.

Actionable Tip: When creating eLearning scenarios, always include decision points where learners can choose different actions and see varying outcomes. This interactive element not only enhances engagement but also helps learners understand the repercussions of their choices, reinforcing the learning objectives in a dynamic way.

Scenario-Planning Tools: 5 Step Plan to Create Your Own Scenario Based eLearning Course

3) Case Studies

Case studies are an excellent way to incorporate concrete examples into eLearning, making complex topics more accessible and relatable. By analyzing real-life instances, learners can connect theoretical concepts to practical applications, enhancing their understanding and retention of the material.

For instance, in courses on environmental compliance, using a case study about a company that suffered financial and reputational losses due to non-compliance provides a vivid example that goes beyond abstract principles.

Learners see firsthand the real-world consequences of ignoring environmental regulations—not just on the environment but also on the company's bottom line and public image.

This method is particularly valuable for teaching judgment, decision-making skills, and best practices. Case studies often present complex situations without straightforward solutions or may include incomplete information, reflecting the real challenges learners might face in their professional lives.

Actionable Tip: To effectively integrate case studies into your eLearning courses, create scenarios that require learners to analyze the situation, make decisions, and then reflect on the potential outcomes of those decisions. This not only makes the learning experience more interactive but also deepens learners' engagement by involving them directly in the problem-solving process.

Also read: Create Better eLearning Courses: 8 Techniques to Engage Your Audience

4) Visual Metaphors

Visual metaphors are an excellent method for adding illustrative examples to eLearning content, helping to demystify complex or unfamiliar topics. By connecting new information to well-known images, these metaphors facilitate understanding and retention.

For example, you might use a pencil to represent the phases of a new company process in an eLearning course. Each part of the pencil—the tip, the body, and the eraser—could symbolize different stages or aspects of the process. This visual metaphor helps learners quickly grasp how each part of the process connects and operates, making abstract concepts more tangible and relatable.

This technique is particularly effective because it leverages the learners' pre-existing knowledge, using familiar visuals to create a bridge to new information. This not only makes the learning process smoother but also encourages deeper engagement and critical thinking about the material.

More Ideas for Using Visual Metaphors in eLearning:

Finance and Economics: Use the metaphor of water flow to explain cash flow in a business. Show how money moves through a company like water through a series of pipes, with faucets representing revenue streams and leaks showing losses or expenses.
Leadership Training: Illustrate leadership pathways using a compass metaphor. Different directions can represent various leadership styles or decisions, helping learners navigate the complexities of leadership roles.
Health and Safety Training: Employ a shield metaphor to discuss protective measures in the workplace. Each part of the shield can represent different safety protocols that collectively protect the worker.
Technical Training: Use a toolbox metaphor where each tool represents a specific skill or piece of knowledge necessary for a job. This can help learners visualize how different skills interact and support one another.

Image Source: Yellopencil.com

5) Video

In today's digital age, learners are inundated with multimedia content daily, making video an ideal format to capture their attention and cater to their learning preferences. Combining both audio and visual elements, videos create a rich, immersive learning experience that can convey complex information in an engaging and digestible way.

Take, for example, teaching seasonal workers how to gift-wrap during the busy holiday season. A well-crafted video can demonstrate the wrapping process in action, showing precisely how to fold corners, where to place tape, and how to tie the ribbon. This visual method is not only faster but also more effective than written instructions, which can be open to interpretation and harder to follow.

Videos are equally effective for more complex training, such as safety procedures or software tutorials. For safety training, a video can simulate emergency situations where workers learn to respond correctly without the real-world risks. In software training, screencasts can guide users through the interface, demonstrating features and functions live on-screen.

Specific Tips for Creating Engaging eLearning Videos:

Keep It Short and Focused: Aim for videos that are concise and targeted to specific learning objectives. Shorter videos (2-5 minutes) help maintain learner attention and are easier to digest.
Use Real-Life Scenarios: Incorporate scenarios that learners might encounter in their jobs. This relevance helps them visualize how they can apply what they're learning in their own work environments.
Interactive Elements: Add interactive elements such as quizzes or embedded questions that pop up during the video. This interactivity not only makes the learning experience more engaging but also reinforces the material.
High-Quality Production: Ensure your videos are high quality with clear audio and visuals. Poor quality can distract and detract from the learning experience.
Diverse Learning Styles: Cater to different learning styles by including captions for those who learn better through reading and detailed explanations for those who appreciate depth.

Also read:

6) Involve Learners

Involving your audience in the creation of examples is a highly effective method for deepening understanding and enhancing retention in eLearning environments. This approach leverages active learning, where people are not merely passive recipients of information but are actively engaged in constructing their own knowledge.

When you present new concepts in your course, asking students to generate real-world examples of these concepts can be transformative. This task compels them to apply their learning directly, encouraging them to think critically about how these concepts manifest in everyday situations.

For instance, if you're teaching principles of economics, you might ask learners to identify examples of supply and demand dynamics in their local supermarket or online shopping experiences.

This method is powerful because it forces employees to connect theoretical knowledge with practical applications, making the learning experience more relevant and personalized. It also encourages them to express these concepts in their own words, which can significantly aid in comprehension and memory.

Actionable Tip: To implement this strategy effectively, after introducing a new concept, prompt learners to share their examples in small group discussions or as part of a class-wide forum. This not only allows them to think through the concepts but also exposes them to diverse perspectives and applications from their peers, enriching the learning experience.

Also read: Five Rules of Engagement All eLearning Designers Should Live By

The importance and effectiveness of using examples in eLearning cannot be overstated. Whenever you find yourself defaulting to lengthy text explanations, that's your cue to introduce an example.

Examples breathe life into the content, making abstract concepts tangible and relatable for learners. If you're struggling to come up with an example, pause and reconsider the relevance of the information.

Remember, if it doesn't resonate with real-life applications, it may feel disconnected and irrelevant to your learners. Always strive to contextualize the learning material through vivid, applicable scenarios.

REFERENCES:

Einsiedel, Albert A., Jr. Case Studies: Indispensable Tools for Trainers

Instructional Strategy Lessons for Educators Secondary Education (ISLES-S)

The Forgetting Curve: Why Your Training Is Erased Within a Week — and How to Stop It

Learning Science & Retention Your people don't have a motivation problem. They have a memory problem — and a 140-year-old experiment maps it precisely. Here's what the science says, and what to do about it on Monday morning. Picture the last mandatory training your organization ran. The completion dashboard glowed green. People passed the quiz. Leadership checked the box. Now ask an uncomfortable question: how much of it could those same employees actually use two weeks later? If the honest answer is “not much,” you're not looking at a failure of effort or attention. You're looking at a fundamental property of the human brain — one that was measured, plotted, and published before the light bulb was in common use. It's called the forgetting curve, and until your learning strategy accounts for it, you are quietly paying to fill a bucket that has a hole in the bottom. A 19th-Century Experiment That Still Governs Your Training Budget In the 1880s, a German psychologist named Hermann Ebbinghaus decided to do something no one had tried: measure memory itself. He created hundreds of meaningless three-letter syllables, memorized them, and then tested how much he could recall after 20 minutes, an hour, a day, and beyond. He plotted the results. What he found has a shape every executive would recognize as a problem: memory doesn't fade gently and evenly. It collapses fast at first — the steepest loss happens within hours of learning — and then the decline slows as whatever survives settles in. Draw it on a graph and you get a cliff, not a gentle slope. Here is the version that matters to anyone responsible for a workforce: 100% 75% 50% 25% 0% Knowledge retained Day 0 Day 1 Day 3 Day 7 Day 30 Time after training review review review One-and-done training Training + spaced reinforcement The red line is what most corporate training buys: a steep drop-off in the days after the session. The green line shows the same content reinforced at spaced intervals. Each review lifts retention back up — and each time, the memory decays more slowly than before. The curve gets flatter with every touch. The important detail isn't the exact numbers on the axis — those vary by person, by material, and by how meaningful the content is. The important detail is the shape. Learning delivered once, then never revisited, follows the red line down. And no amount of polish on the original session changes that trajectory. A beautifully produced course that is never reinforced forgets just as fast as a boring one. This Isn't a Theory. It Has Been Replicated for 140 Years. It would be fair to be skeptical of a result from the 1880s built on one person memorizing nonsense syllables. So it's worth knowing that Ebbinghaus's curve is one of the most durable findings in all of psychology. A rigorous 2015 replication reproduced his forgetting curve closely, confirming that the basic shape holds up under modern methods. More importantly for organizations, the solution the curve implies has been tested far more broadly than the curve itself. A landmark scientific review synthesized 317 experiments on how the timing of practice affects memory. The conclusion is one of the most consistent in learning science: spreading learning out over time produces dramatically better long-term retention than cramming it into a single session. Same content, same total time — different result, purely because of when it was delivered. 317 separate experiments, synthesized in one landmark review, point to the same conclusion: spaced learning beats massed learning for durable retention. This is not a trend or a vendor claim — it is settled science. “The single most under-used lever in corporate learning isn't better content or bigger budgets. It's timing. When you deliver training is as decisive as what you deliver.” Why the Standard Corporate Training Model Fights the Brain Most organizational learning is designed almost perfectly to sit on the wrong line of that graph. Consider how a typical program works: 1 It's an event, not a process A half-day workshop, an annual compliance module, a one-time onboarding marathon. The brain treats a single exposure as low-priority information and prunes it — exactly as the curve predicts. 2 It front-loads everything Cramming a year's worth of policy into one sitting feels efficient and is the opposite. Massed delivery is the single fastest way to guarantee the steep red curve. 3 It measures completion, not retention A 95% completion rate tells you people sat through the content. It says nothing about whether they'll remember it when the moment to apply it arrives — which is the only thing that affects performance. 4 It never comes back Without a deliberate second, third, and fourth touch, there is no mechanism to interrupt forgetting. The reinforcement that flattens the curve simply never happens. The result is an expensive illusion of learning. The activity is real. The lasting capability is not. And because the forgetting happens quietly, weeks after the training when no one is looking, the loss rarely shows up on any report. What Working With the Curve Looks Like Instead The good news hidden in the forgetting curve is that it also hands you the fix. Every time a memory is retrieved and reinforced, it decays more slowly afterward. So the entire game becomes: interrupt the drop-off, at the right moments, with the least possible friction. Here is how that translates into practice. The event model (fights the curve) The reinforcement model (works with it) One long session, then silence A short initial session, then spaced follow-ups over days and weeks Passive re-reading of slides Active recall — a quick question that forces the brain to retrieve the answer Everyone reviews everything People revisit what they got wrong, not what they already know Training lives in a separate portal Reinforcement arrives in the flow of work, in two-minute doses Success = course completed Success = knowledge still there weeks later, and visible in behavior 1. Turn the event into a sequence The most powerful change costs almost nothing: stop thinking of training as a day and start thinking of it as a campaign. A 40-minute course followed by three short reinforcement touches over the next month will outperform a two-hour course followed by nothing — with less total seat time. 2. Make people retrieve, not re-read Reinforcement works because the brain has to pull the answer out, not because it sees the content again. A single well-placed question — “What's the first step if you spot this?” — does more for retention than re-watching the whole module. Build retrieval into every touch. 3. Space the touches, then widen the gaps Revisit new material soon after the first exposure, then let the intervals grow — a day, then several days, then a couple of weeks. As the memory strengthens, it needs reinforcing less often. Each cycle buys a flatter curve and a longer runway. 4. Personalize what gets reviewed Forcing a top performer to review what they already know wastes their time and erodes goodwill. Reinforcement should concentrate on each person's weak spots. This is where the reinforcement model stops being a scheduling exercise and starts requiring a system that can adapt to the individual. Key Takeaway The forgetting curve is not a reason to spend more on training. It's a reason to spend differently. The organizations that win aren't the ones with the biggest course libraries — they're the ones that reinforce a smaller amount of content at the right moments, so it actually survives. The Business Case Is Simpler Than It Looks Strip away the neuroscience and the argument for organizations is blunt. If most of what you teach is gone within a week, then the true cost of one-and-done training isn't the price of the course. It's the price of the course plus everything that goes wrong because the knowledge wasn't there when it counted — the compliance miss, the safety lapse, the sales conversation that fell flat, the new hire who takes twice as long to become productive. Reinforcement doesn't just improve a training metric. It's the difference between learning that changes what people do and learning that briefly changes what they can recite. For any leader who has ever wondered why a well-run training program didn't move performance, the forgetting curve is usually the answer — and the reinforcement model is usually the remedy. How SHIFT Helps You Beat the Curve This is precisely the problem SHIFT was built to solve. For nearly three decades, we've helped global organizations move learning off the steep red line and onto the flatter green one — not with more content, but with smarter delivery. Our AI-powered ecosystem is designed around how memory actually works: create engaging learning fast, then reinforce it with spaced, retrieval-based touches that adapt to each learner and reach them in the flow of work. Instead of a single event that fades by Friday, you get a sequence engineered to make knowledge stick — and the measurement to prove it did. 1 Built for reinforcement, not just delivery Learning is designed as a sequence of well-timed touches, so retention is engineered in from the start rather than hoped for after the fact. 2 Adaptive by design Each learner spends their time on what they haven't yet mastered — the personalization that makes reinforcement efficient instead of tedious. 3 Proven at global scale Six million people trained across more than 43 countries, backed by nearly 30 years of eLearning expertise and roughly 20 industry awards. This is battle-tested, not experimental. Stop paying to be forgotten. See how SHIFT turns one-and-done training into learning that survives the forgetting curve — and shows up in performance. Request a Demo The Bottom Line Ebbinghaus proved something in the 1880s that most organizations still ignore in the 2020s: without reinforcement, learning evaporates, fast. The forgetting curve isn't a footnote in a psychology textbook. It's a line item in your budget — the invisible cost of every program that ends the moment the session does. You can't switch off forgetting. But you can decide which curve your people ride. The question isn't whether your training is being forgotten. It's whether you're going to do anything about it. Sources: Ebbinghaus, H., Über das Gedächtnis (1885) • Murre, J.M.J. & Dros, J., “Replication and Analysis of Ebbinghaus' Forgetting Curve,” PLOS ONE (2015) • Cepeda, N.J., Pashler, H., Vul, E., Wixted, J.T. & Rohrer, D., “Distributed Practice in Verbal Recall Tasks,” Psychological Bulletin (2006)

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SHIFT's eLearning Blog

6 Ways to Incorporate Examples into Your eLearning Courses

6 Ways to Incorporate Examples into Your eLearning Courses

1) Screenshots

2) Scenarios and Stories

3) Case Studies

4) Visual Metaphors

5) Video

6) Involve Learners

Silvia Rojas

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