How to Add Curiosity in eLearning Stories - Tip #15

Eric Schmidt is Executive Chairman of Google. Along with Jared Cohen, they penned  The New Digital Age: Reshaping the Future of People, Nations and Business.

In the book, Schmidt and Cohen emphasize the need to constantly inspire people to be curious.  Curiosity is the key to technological innovation and advancements.  It can be related to anticipation, the need to predict, look forward and dream.

The key aspect is the unknown which propels many of us to get curious.

Wikipedia defines curiosity as a quality related to inquisitive thinking such as exploration, investigation and learning very evident during observations in humans and many animal species. 

How do we stir the sense of curiosity in our learners through the addition of triggers in our elearning design?

An  example of our interest is about google glass or about the google self-driving car. Because of the learners' constant readiness to learn following his/her objectives,  a small trigger embedded in our design elevates the sense of curiosity.

Here are some tips to help you.

1. Invite learners to a sneak preview.
This is where movie trailers work. When you show a trailer to the learner, this instinctively raises the learner's anticipation.

Before you show the whole elearning lesson story, you may start by showing a photo, then asking the learners certain questions.

View the photo below.  Then respond to the question corresponding to the image.

Which part intrigues you?
Were you interested to continue?
Did you ask yourself, I wonder what will happen?

Providing a simple pause to allow for a preview followed by a question, helps raise the learners' curiosity.


2. Ask questions like "What if...?"

What if my boss does not like the results?
What if the client does not get his needs met on time?



The "what-if" creates instant scenarios in the mind of the learner and helps to increase curiosity.

3. Ask about a dream... a possibility ... a time travel. 

In his book "The Recursive Mind: The Origins of Human Language, Thought, and Civilization", Michael Corballis writes about people's ability to engage in recursive thinking - the ability to insert ourselves in our own stories and other people's stories. He says we travel through time - in the past, now and the future.

Inviting learners to journey through time has proven to be very helpful in learning from past experiences, creating the "now experiences" and projecting future experiences. This is how people learn.

To raise learners' curiosity, ask them to reflect on the past and present, and project what they would do differently in the future.

Ray Jimenez, PhD
Vignettes Learning
"Helping Learners Learn Their Way"http://storytakes.com/output/4585/1327/index.html