Powerpoint is not the only fruit...

People have different preferences when it comes to learning.

You must bear this in mind when you are designing your training materials, if not, the chances of you meeting your learning objectives just got a lot slimmer.

Listed below are some general ideas to help you create course materials which are participatory, keep the audience engaged and increase the chances that your Learning Objectives will be achieved.

Group exercises

Breaking the learners into small groups is a great way to get a lot of discussion going, and it encourages the less outgoing individuals to take part. Some things to bear in mind:

• Give them a clear objective or topic to discuss
• Perhaps give each group a different/related task or challenge
• Wrap up and collect all the input as a group and discuss the outcomes
• Always check that all the points have been covered before moving on
• Always thank the group for their interaction.

You can use a flipchart or whiteboard to summarise the outcomes, and you can invite the more outgoing members of each group to report their findings back. 

Group discussions

Encouraging a discussion can be hard work if you haven't laid the right foundations during the training. Asking open questions (questions which allow a broad set of responses) helps to encourage learners to take part. Always praise interaction, always thank people for their question or input; this will encourage them to do more. Whatever you do, don't put one person 'on the spot', this can be humiliating and will discourage others from participating. Make it clear that there are no wrong answers (even if there are!) and leave it to the group to explain the reasons why. 

Quiz

If you can find some specific points of knowledge, a fun way of checking that everyone has learned those points is with a quiz. Pay attention to ambiguous questions, unless you want to use the quiz to highlight a specific point for discussion. You have the option of awarding prizes, but in a learning environment it is wise to acknowledge that everyone should have the 'right answers' by the end of the course.

Post-it notes

Post-it notes are brilliant for collecting ideas, grouping them, moving them from one flipchart to another etc. Make sure that you have enough of good thick pens and that the post-its are big enough so that everyone can read them from a distance.

Hands-on exercises

The Poster Tour

Instead of preparing slides, think about preparing informational posters and putting them up around the walls, and walking the group around to them. Walking and standing up helps blood flow and therefore interaction and learning, and its a nice break from sitting down all day. The posters, or hand drawn flipcharts, need not be highly designed, should not contain a lot of text (similar to a good presention slide) and should have one clear message which can be discussed.

Role Play

In certain cases, especially in a small group, a role play can be a fun and interactive way to practice some learning. You should prepare the scenario so that it is as realistic as possible to get the best outcome, and you should allow time for discussion after the exercise, e.g. "How did we do?, What could we do differently?". Again, you should have a clear objective in mind for this to work properly, and you will probably need to practice it a few times before the training to tweak it.

Thinking Time

This might sound obvious, but you should always try to allow time for the new knowledge to 'sink in'. You can set this up so the learners can 'sleep on it', or over lunch, or just 10 minutes quiet time. This applies to all the training methods above.