How to Teach 'Dry' or Boring Topics

Teaching boring topics can be highly challenging, especially if the learners or trainees aren't interested. Health and safety trainers arrive at these barriers often; people can be reluctant to learn because they have do it rather than wanting to do it, and many feel that the subject is common sense.

To meet legislation and ensure everyone's safety in the workplace, empoyers must provide Health & Safety training. So how can we make it more interesting?

Here are 3 key ways to make a boring topic engaging:

1. Make it interactive

Allow the learner to interact with the course material. Hands-on experience will allow the person to process the information, store it and recall it at a later date far more easily than if they were simply talked at.

2. Add humour

Humour lightens everybody's mood, and humour helps to break down barriers between the trainer and the learners. Creating a relaxed environment means that learners are more likely to participate and less likely to resent being there, especially in people who think they don't need the course.

3. Appeal to all learner types

People learn differently; some are visual learners, some auditory, some kinaesthetic (movement) and some prefer to read or write. Encourage all of these methods, and encourage people to take advantage of their preferred method.

So how do we at Esky incorporate all of these factors into our distance learning courses?

Interactive: The courses include games that allow users to put procedures in the correct order, identify health and safety hazards in the workplace and other ways to put their new knowledge into practice.

Humour: Our courses include a whole host of interesting characters that lead you through the basics of health and safety, some very serious and some quite silly. All are designed to break down barriers and resistance to learning.

Types: Esky courses are animated and use a combination of still images, moving images, narration, sounds, interactive movement of objects on screen and text to reinforce key ideas. This means that all types of learners are catered to throughout the courses.

To see a demo of our Health & Safety course, visit the course page here.