Yesterday’s post outlined what edutainment in the workplace is and some potential problems it prompts as a stand-alone training strategy. Here’s more information about how you can incorporate edutainment into your training strategy so that it’s both engaging and effective.
Edutainment Works when Combined with Engaging and Hands-On Activities
If you want your employees to remain engaged with your edutainment, pair your edutainment with hands-on activities. For example, after your sales employees watch an entertaining video with an employee-customer interaction, have them branch off in pairs and play-act the scene they just witnessed, where one employee acts as the sales associate and the other acts as the prospective customer. This way, the employees are much more likely to remember what they learned in the video, as they will put what they witnessed into action in real life.
There are many ways that you can bring edutainment to life in the workplace so that it retains its value and effectiveness. And the point of pairing hands-on training activities with entertaining learning content is to allow your learners to connect what they’re learning and being entertained by to their everyday work tasks and real-life work environment.
It is not enough for your employees to simply watch what others can do or to see flashing animations and lifelike simulations. They must connect the dots between their entertaining training content and how it applies to what they should and could be doing while on the job every day. So, they must be provided with hands-on opportunities throughout their training to demonstrate they understand firsthand what’s being covered.
Tips for More Engaging Learning with Edutainment
Along with providing hands-on activities with your edutainment, there are some other things you can do to ensure your edutainment is reaching its maximum potential.
- Utilize formal and informal learning methods and content that’s entertaining. You’ll want to encourage your learners to discuss and share learning content with one another across social outlets. And you’ll also want them to engage with and complete developed course material, too.
- Pair edutainment with hands-on activities and assessments so that its value and effectiveness can be qualitatively analyzed.
- Collect and consult your learners’ data often so that you can periodically analyze what edutainment is being viewed and shared the most, as well as if your employees’ assessments indicate whether it’s effective or not. For instance, an entertaining video that is shared a lot and yields high assessment scores indicating high levels of knowledge retention is indicative of high-quality learning content that is also entertaining.
Ultimately, edutainment can be ineffective and may not work but only when it’s not paired with other training content. However, when edutainment is paired with hands-on training activities and targeted assessments, it can prove to be effective and valuable.