Rethinking questions in e-learning

Great teachers interact with their students.
To engage them, not to test them.

Why don’t we do the same in e-learning more often?
Most e-learning courses still use the standard Course/Assessment pattern where the questions are used strictly for testing purposes.
The questions are also commonly used at the end of learning slides or modules to help learners embed what they’ve recently learned.
But have you ever used a question at the beginning of the course?

Live trainers do it all the time. You could easily start a course with a poll (and instantly share the results).
You can also ask a question about the topic that is going to be explained after the question.

This makes learners think about the topic but can also make them aware they don’t know everything and increases their motivation to continue with the course.
Last but not least, questions can be used to deliver information too.

If a learner gets the answer wrong, the explanation following the question can quickly help them understand their mistake (and learn something new).
The JollyDeck authoring platform provides 15 different question types that can be included in the learning content. It would be a shame to use only multiple-choice questions at the end of the course, wouldn’t it?