Someone once said all learning starts with a story. They probably went on to tell a story about how they realised that. Right idea. If you can hook and engage your audience up front, all the more likely they'll stay the journey. Stories are one of the best ways of doing this.

So why are stories effective? What's in a good story for learning?

Last time we wrote about the benefits of stories in learning. They're easy to remember, they're compellting, they're great shorthand for real experience, and of course they're authentic, which is maybe the most compelling aspect of all.

So how can you bring stories into your e-learning? Here are some practical tips.

For the last few weeks we've talked about stories in e-learning and why they're a great way to make your e-learning memorable, authentic and engaging. What else can you do to bring a narrative into e-learning? What are the practical points when it comes to writing dialogue?

The bookshelves heave with screenwriting manuals. Save yourself a few quid and start with a few basic tips for good dialogue writing in e-learning.

Samuel Beckett described his approach to life as ‘Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try Again. Fail again. Fail better.’ Too existential for you? Try American actress Tallulah Bankhead: “If I had to live my life again, I'd make the same mistakes, only sooner.”

What’s the point? Mistakes are good. They’re our best teachers. So how to get mistakes into your e-learning?

Last week we explored the value of mistake-driven e-learning. If you can hone in on the mistakes, misperceptions and performance gaps that’s causing 80% of the issues for your target audience, you’ve got the fodder for creating e-learning that adds real value. E-learning can do this by creating safe environments in which your learners can make mistakes, and providing the coaching and support to reduce risk that they’re repeated on the job.

How to work mistakes into your e-learning design?

We’ve looked in our previous e-learning tips at mistakes and the key role they play in e-learning design. But a mistake’s not worth making if you don’t learn from it. We’ve all been there: the e-learning leaves you hanging with the worst feedback you can get: ‘wrong – try again’. It can sound enigmatic coming from Yoda, but it doesn’t really cut it as feedback in e-learning. To make sure your mistakes are coupled with support and feedback that will actually help learners, follow these tips.

The new economic realities mean that every manager up and down your organisation is going to have to fight to spend money on anything. You can expect e-learning to come under as much scrutiny as the next line item. It pays to be prepared. If you’re responsible for commissioning e-learning or running an internal team, be ready to fight the good fight. For this insight, let’s concentrate on the cost savings from e-learning, compared to instructor led alternatives. Here are a few bullets to have ready when someone comes asking why we should spend on e-learning.

Last week we looked at some of the arguments for e-learning from a cost viewpoint. You may find your stakeholders saying “We get that it’s cheaper. But is it better?” Here are some of the reasons you can use to explain why e-learning’s better than classroom – most of the time.

“If I'd had more time, I would have written a shorter letter.”
T.S. Eliot (probably)

In an earlier insight, we talked about the value of dialogue, and how it can give your e-learning pace and authenticity. A client recently talked to us at Kineo about how some of their in-house programmes were suffering from too much dialogue, with the result that the learning points were getting lost. So as a companion piece to an earlier insight, here are a few words of caution about dialogue in e-learning.