Finally after all these years of telling clients that animation isn’t just for kids the world is slowly starting to catch on!  As animation starts to become much more mainstream and a part of everyday life from TV adverts to summer blockbusters we are seeing a mind shift from many of the industries that we work with in how they want to utilise animation.

The area we are starting to see biggest acceptance of animation is in the online training, eLearning sector.  As animation becomes increasingly part of the public's conscience companies are starting to see that the flexibility of animation and it’s ability to engage an audience are fantastic assets for delivering learning material to an audience. At the end of the day, learners no longer want to sit through a PowerPoint presentation or standard video when they can be told a story, which can be brought to life through animation and actually takes them on a journey, while accommodating all the necessary facts.

Animation can be seen as a much more ‘lean back’ delivery medium which allows the learner to relax and let their guard down leaving them more open to engaging with the content and retaining the information. And the possibilities are endless! Animation provides companies with a vehicle to access their audience and create the kind of emotion they want to trigger through their eLearning training. It’s also vital to take into account how an audience learns to ensure that everyone’s attention is captured, including those who don’t engage through written copy or traditional learning delivery methods. For all of our animations we use the principles of NLP that we covered in an earlier Blog post. When thinking of using animation in eLearning, you can still use a ‘trainer’ to take the learner through the learning journey.

Often animated ‘tutors’ conjure up mental images of the annoying paper clip that used to pop up in Microsoft word but this doesn’t have to be the case. A well created animated character can help enhance e-learning and information retention, by providing an identifiable figure that can become a training ambassador. This approach of using well-designed characters, that support and work alongside the learner, can provide a virtual tutor or learning partner, as well as be more ‘light-hearted’ if needed. 

The flexibility of these characters mean that they can also work across many communication channels providing a viable learning ‘brand’ for the company that the learners can identify with. This character can then be used in print, marketing and on a LMS environment and website as an instantly recognisable learning brand. As a result of this mind shift we have been lucky enough work with some household names to produce fun and engaging elearning content for their workforce.

As we too in the past have been victims of boring online elearning material and endless powerpoint slides of learning content, this new work has made us feel warm and fuzzy inside that we are saving similar poor souls this fate and instead delivering fun and engaging eLearning content that they might even remember! For more information on animation for eLearning keep your eyes peeled for our article in the January 2014 edition of Training Journal which covers this in more detail, or contact us directly if you would like a copy.