How to Prevent Frustration for Your Learners: Tips to Keep Them Engaged
Frustration is a natural part of the elearning process. When our brains encounter something they can’t quite figure out, we experience that moment as frustration.
This phenomenon is actually can be a good thing because it signals to our brains that there’s more work to be done.
Learning is a complex process and require efforts.
Time
Repetition
Focus
Dedication
Stress Management
In this blog post, you will learn how frustrating moments are an essential part of the learning process and what you can do to help learners work through those challenges so they keep progressing instead of giving up on their new skills.
Keep reading to discover how and why learners get frustrated, ways you can reduce learner frustration in your own elearning courses, and some great examples of how other Instructional Designers and eLearning designers have tackled this issue from different angles.
Increase Learners Engagement
What is Learning Frustration?
Frustration is an emotional response to feeling like you can’t get what you want or need. It can stem from a number of things, including :
Stress,
Boredom,
Uncertainty,
Or feeling like your efforts aren’t making a difference.
When it comes to learning, frustration is when learners hit a wall and feel like they can’t move forward.
When their brains are working hard to understand new concepts, but are left wanting more, frustration creeps in.
Learning frustration can manifest itself in many different ways. It could be feelings of impatience or restlessness, a desire to skip ahead to more familiar topics, or feeling like there’s no hope of understanding new information at all. Frustration can also result in learners shutting down and giving up on the learning experience entirely.
Why do we experience frustration when learning?
When we learn something new, the pathway to our brains responsible for processing that information is not fully developed.
It’s a process called synaptic pruning, and it happens throughout our lives. For example, we all have memories of childhood memories like riding a bike or reading.
But why do we have memories of these things at all?
The answer is that our brains are creating pathways so that we can remember these things later. These pathways rely on our environment to spark the neurons in our brains that will help us remember.
But here’s the catch:
when we’re young, our brains are super sensitive to external stimuli, which is why kids are so much better at remembering events from their childhood than adults are.
These external stimuli, like the smell of the grass after a rainstorm or the feel of the leaves on the trees, help trigger memories of specific events, and we don’t forget them.
Tip 1: Present Just Enough Content to Incite Curiosity
As a learner progresses through your course, they will inevitably reach a point where they don’t fully understand what they need to know next.
When this happens, they will feel frustrated. When you are aware of your learner’s confidence level, you can present just enough information to fuel their curiosity and help them feel confident enough to move on.
Solutions :
MicroLearning
Nuggets Learning
Do Not overload
Video Learning
Live Discussions
When you present too much information, you risk overwhelming learners with too much information, causing them to feel frustrated. You also risk boring them, which interferes with the necessary process of triggering curiosity that can help learners build confidence and discover new insights.
Tip 2: Provide Just Enough Instruction to Build Confidence
When your learners are feeling confident, they are more likely to keep progressing through your course, build new skills, and retain what they’ve learned.
Because every elearner is unique, it can be difficult to know exactly how much instruction to give each learner. It’s important to remember that learners learn in a variety of ways, so there’s no one-size-fits-all approach to providing just enough instruction to build confidence.
Build Aids
Increase eCoaching
Adopted Social Learning
Be Learner centric
In terms of learner experience, there are a few factors that can help you decide how much instruction to give:
What stage of the learning journey are they currently in?
Where are they in their personal growth journey?
What learning styles do they prefer?
What feedback have they given you about what they need more or less of?
Tip 3: Offer Shorter Repetition Cycles
When we’re taught something new, our brains are hardwired to expect repetition. We need to see something done over and over again to build the pathways in our brains that will help us remember.
But we don’t need to learn something once and then never forget it. There’s a sweet spot in the repetition cycle that encourages our brains to build the necessary pathways without requiring superhuman amounts of patience.
When teaching new concepts, start with a longer repetition cycle. This will help your learners build confidence in their new skills and make a transition to a shorter repetition cycle easier.
Tip 4: Provide Meaningful Repetition
If you want to use shorter repetition cycles, you also need to make sure the repetition your learners are doing is meaningful. When you provide lots of meaningless repetition, you run the risk of boring your learners, which will cause them to tune out.
Interaction
Video Learning
Create Activities
Regular Webinars
Chat & Forums
Group work
This can make it harder for them to build the necessary pathways in their brains to remember what they’ve learned. When you provide meaningful repetition, you are helping your learners build confidence in their new skills and making it easier for them to transition to shorter repetition cycles.
Tip 5: Mix Up your Activities and Assessment Practices
When you’re building your eLearning course, try to mix up your activities and assessment practices. Don’t just rely on one activity or take one approach to assessing your learners’ progress.
Activity variety, including different types of media, games for learners to play, and ways for learners to engage with content, can help break up the monotony of repetitive activities and reinforce new knowledge in different ways.
Similarly, when you use a variety of assessment practices, you can help your learners stay engaged and build confidence more quickly.
Conclusion
Learning frustration is a natural part of the learning process. When we encounter new concepts and ideas, our brains work hard to make sense of them, which requires energy.
This process taxes our mental resources, which can cause us to feel frustrated. When you’re designing eLearning courses, you can help learners avoid frustration by presenting just enough content to incite curiosity, providing just enough instruction to build confidence, offering shorter repetition cycles, mixing up your activities and assessment practices, and keeping in mind that every learner has different needs and abilities.