Storytelling and Release Conditions Photo by Daniel Schludi on Unsplash. Many of the Brightspace...
Storytelling and Release Conditions
Photo by Daniel Schludi on Unsplash.
Many of the Brightspace tools can be used to tell stories – Intelligent Agents can deliver stories right to your learners’ email inbox, Surveys can be set up for branching scenarios, Discussions can encourage learners to tell their own stories. One additional Brightspace tool has great application with storytelling: Release Conditions.
Unfamiliar with Release Conditions? Check out How Do Release Conditions Work and Adding or Editing Release Conditions in Content.
Release Conditions provide an incentive for your learners to “turn the page”. If you create a longer story and break it into sections, you can ask your learners to complete various tasks to unlock the rest of the story.
Our story-wired brains want to know what happens next, so we are motivated to finish the necessary work. Alternatively, you can require learners to read a story that unlocks further content related to the story. This would be well-served in psychology or health courses where a person’s story dictates the care they may require.
Using Release Conditions provides a measure of agency for learners, making them feel in control of the story and their education, which is a powerful motivator on its own. It also turns your storytelling-enhanced course into a quest and parallels a simple video-game setup, which many online learners enjoy.
For additional engagement, a storytelling element combined with a quiz for which the correct answer releases additional content adds a level of gamification that could lead to bragging rights for your learners. Adding an Award, like badges, provides an extra layer of fun and interactivity with the content.
Learner engagement is at the heart of online learning, and storytelling and Release Conditions are a great combination for increasing learner engagement. The time investment required for adding these elements to an online course is well worth the effort.
For more information on how to incorporate storytelling into learning, please visit [Archived Content] Learning through Story.