Best Practices For Your Next Course

How Humor Boosts eLearning Training Engagement And Retention

Humor has the power to work wonders when appropriately used in eLearning training. However, when misused, it can ruin the entire experience. Humorous accents must be well-chosen and, importantly, understood by the audience as intended by the author. Poorly executed humor can be offensive, embarrassing, and counterproductive. This is a challenging art, so much so that well-crafted humor in eLearning is quite rare. Designers often avoid humor out of fear that it will not be received as expected.

What Types Of Humor Can Be Applied To eLearning Training?

Those commonly found in the film industry:

1. Situational Humor

This works well in onboarding training with a storyline structure where a stranger arrives in town. It involves placing the hero in unfortunate or extraordinary predicaments as they explore new areas. However, one must ensure that there isn’t too much situational humor. The primary goal of the training is to educate, not to entertain.

2. Character (Personality) Humor

This involves creating easily identifiable characters with specific personality traits written into the script. The description of the character and their behavior highlights traits relevant to the training objective (e.g., exaggeration tendency or panic fear of evaluation). The audience is amused not only by the character’s creation but also by situations arising from their personality.

3. Linguistic Humor

This includes skillfully woven humorous dialogues or witty catchphrases of characters that enrich conversations.

Key Point: Knowing Your Audience

How do you match humor to the training? First and foremost, know the audience’s specifics, their work conditions, the issues the training addresses, and the company’s organizational culture. Surveys, individual interviews, or group discussions with training users are useful tools for this. Try to identify common elements for the entire group, such as belonging to a specific business area or type of work performed. This makes it easier to design humorous elements in the script.

Imagine eLearning on customer service with a slightly humorous typology of customers for sales departments. The goal is to pique interest in the training content while “softening” and “familiarizing” the topic. Another example could be a narrator in certification training for configuring rack servers, depicted as a slightly exaggerated IT specialist. Adding humorous dialogues with specialized jargon increases the likelihood that the course will be engaging and memorable.

Humor is also useful when introducing eLearning into an organization when users are just getting acquainted with this educational method. Comedy can appear in the training itself and in internal communication about the project. I recall an anti-money laundering eLearning in a bank, where the main character was a slightly caricatured Inspector Błond (original spelling), who was on an international investigation looking for money launderers. He visited a local bank branch, interrogating its employees. His amusing remarks praised how fantastic the bank’s procedures were in preventing criminal activities.

In such narrative techniques, it’s important not to trivialize the message. It should only serve as a pretext for learning, engaging the user enough to delve into the material without resistance.

Humor Must Align With Training Content

The humor used in eLearning must be appropriate for the training content, consistent with the brand identity, and supportive of the topic. Inconsistencies, lack of logic, or connections will be quickly spotted by users, making thoughtful solutions crucial. One of the challenges for a scriptwriter is skillfully integrating humorous elements with the training content.

Imagine an eLearning course on passenger service at a railway station. Humorous elements can appear in dialogues and how scenes are presented. The conductor (a character in the scene) patiently answers an elderly lady’s detailed travel stories. This conversation takes much longer than a typical passenger-conductor interaction.

How do you incorporate humor in such a scene? The neighboring passenger, who also wants to ask a question about the journey, becomes increasingly impatient. This impatience can be highlighted with appropriate facial expressions, multiple attempts to ask the question, or the choice of the elderly lady’s voice. Regardless of how the humor is emphasized, remember one thing: the conductor must demonstrate professionalism and patience, as the training teaches passenger service standards. These standards and best practices should be taken seriously.

Why Include Humor In eLearning Training?

Humor increases engagement, enriches content, and enhances memory retention. Difficult and often boring material can make eLearning uninteresting and hard to remember. But how do you incorporate humor in a systems training course? Perhaps enrich the course with a guide character who has a humorous manner of speaking or a paranoid fear of breaking procedures, which are the training’s content. The audience should easily identify the humor in these situations to align the scriptwriter’s intentions with the expected reaction.

Appropriate humor, tailored to the target group, distinguishes training from other courses. What do employees remember from eLearning? Typos, mistakes, useful content, and well-placed humorous scenes relevant to their company’s reality. A well-placed situational joke is remembered much quicker, and long after the training, the audience associates it with specific content. Sometimes, catchphrases or situations become part of the company’s language and continue to be used long after the training access ends.

What To Watch Out For When Incorporating Humor In eLearning Training Modules

Humor in training is a delicate topic requiring great sensitivity and significant skills in scriptwriting.

• Cultural differences
  Especially when preparing a course for use in several countries. What’s funny in one country may be offensive in another, so cultural awareness is essential.
• Repetitions
  A repeated joke stops being funny and quickly becomes annoying.
• Overloading with jokes
  Remember, the goal of training is not to amuse and elicit laughter but to deliver knowledge and teach skills. Keep this in mind.
• Only one type of humor
  Vary humorous elements to avoid boring the audience and ensure that each humorous element is a pleasant surprise, not a predictable repetition. Skillfully mix situational humor with verbal humor.
• Too harsh jokes
  Avoid jokes that can be controversial by nature. Remember that everyone has different sensitivities.
• Inappropriate humor for the target group
  If the group is very busy, humorless professionals, humor may be seen as an annoying waste of their precious time. Don’t risk it.

Conclusion

Humor in eLearning is possible and can be very beneficial. However, it is a challenging art, so much so that successful, goal-supporting humor in eLearning is rare. Designers avoid it mainly out of fear that it will not be received as expected. But sometimes it might be worth the risk to make the training effective and memorable.