Animation has certainly come a long way. Today we have the best artwork in animated movies, anime, video games, even covers for books, movies and music albums.
However, an animation is not only used as a selling point or marketing trick for products, it also has an application in the education industry. Animation can be a powerful learning tool, and more eLearning programs rely on it to make classes more efficient.
We know that education has been improved thanks to learning management systems and that teachers can have better content and class organization while relying on these tools. With animation, your learning management system will improve further and we will explore the top benefits of it right here.
Make the learning experience more fun
One of the main reasons why animation was not used in the classroom, is because professors and teachers considered it a distraction. So, it’s possible that contributions were overlooked and its value was diminished, primarily because learning was always something that should be taken seriously.
However, over the years it was discovered that the learning process is significantly improved if it occurs on a subconscious level. Young people who watch cartoons and play video games learn different facts and different words without really making a conscious effort to learn them.
Using animation, you can make classes more fun and gamify them, in a way, thus creating more positive learning conditions. As a result, students will be more eager to learn and won’t regard classes as something tedious.
Boost students’ power of retention
Our power of retention can receive a formidable boost if there are more elements involved. In other words, if you rely solely on text, you cannot expect students to remember all of the details after a single reading session. Lectures should include both visual and audio input in order for students to remember them more vividly.
Animation is one way to improve lectures, however, it would be really wise to pair it with audio. You can use background music so that students become more immersed in the animation and use a clear and easy to follow voice for narration.
The audio component is also capable of making an emotional ambience which is why it is used so much in movies, especially animated ones. If you are to make the whole experience more believable, you need adequate music to pull it off.
Make the class more engaging
Immersion is not the only thing that makes the class more engaging. By evoking the right emotion, you can control whether the audience will take the topic seriously or as something fun or even be moved by it. Your animation should have a virtual eLearning character or an animated assistant, and he or she should be able to convey the right emotion.
If you are discussing serious topics like dangers at the workplace, or sexual harassment, the narrator and symbols you use should be light-hearted, since it’s important for observers to take the subject seriously.
On the other hand, if you want to convey interesting facts or funny facts, you should use an animation that will evoke that type of emotion. If the class is emotionally invested in the lecture, the memories they form will be easier to access and will last longer.
Segment the lesson into more meaningful chunks
An important thing you should know is that animation can be a distraction if it is not utilized in the correct manner. For example, if your animated eLearning assistant begins a lesson with a lengthy backstory that has no relevance to the subject you are teaching, it will be an unnecessary waste of time.
Moreover, you should not regard animation as a magical tool that can make the learning process enticing instantly, so do not overburden your lecture with too many moving images or infographics etc.
You can use it to turn a lesson into a story and to help learners understand that the knowledge they just received has a practical use. You can use it too exemplify common misconnections to make a distinction between two similar facts or to simplify complex topics and make them easier to understand.
Our brains have incredible learning capacities, but animation cannot expand our memory in a way that we are able to retain more, it only prevents us from forgetting a larger portion of the lecture.
Give learners more control over the lesson
Finally, if learners have more control over the lesson, they will become more engaged as well. The animation you use should take on the mantel of a professor, and therefore allow students to interact with it, e.g. ask questions.
These types of features are now readily available and are far more advanced than you might think, despite the fact that we still do not have a fully functional artificial intelligence.
It is important that your eLearning animation has these qualities because, without it, the lecture is basically reduced to watching an informative video. Furthermore, your students should have the ability to pause the lecture or rewind it, in order to go over the part they did not fully understand or to sort out the things they’ve learned so far.
Conclusion
These are the most important features of animation in eLearning, and you should ensure that your eLearning management system can support them. Lectures can be so much more productive if we use the right tools, and with such a high-detailed visual aid systems at our disposal, every learning session can be significantly more interesting.