Should you be educating or entertaining?

Eugene Beetge

9 years ago

The modern student is spoilt for choice. Bombarded with every form of social media, multimedia channels, apps, games, the list goes on. Although all of these interactive elements can play their own role in learning, there is a fine line between education and entertainment.

Online course providers make use of interactive elements to stimulate the learning process. They are great tools and can be used to enhance learning, b

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ut what is too much?

Let’s analyse this by means of the following graphic depiction we have put together to explain how levels of engagement and interactivity have an effect on one another:

Levels of Engagement – Our ability to draw the student in to the learning process.

Levels of Interactivity – The level of interaction provided by the content. This ranges from its simplest and lowest form of uploading a .pdf for a student to download and read all the way to interactive design, with videos, animated graphics etc.

At the lowest form of interaction, or the .pdf upload, our student is at his lowest engagement with the content. At the students highest engagement he is required to interact with software to partake in the course. Note that the graph shoots up around the centre point where costs become high as well as the complexity to provide the interaction. Here we are reaching a point where the debate between education and entertainment becomes a valid one.

Thus we believe the ideal to be around this centre point, where costs are still manageable, there is a degree of interaction required from the student and thus he is engaged in the course and content.

We are open to discuss this in greater detail with individuals who require more information.