Perfect timing : making the most of a screen timer eLearning asset

At Gomo, we’re always looking to provide new eLearning assets and tools that help you to create imaginative, engaging courses and find a range of ways to test your learners’ progress. Here’s how our new screen timer eLearning asset can enhance your eLearning.

If you enjoy taking part in quizzes and assessments, you’re probably already used to the challenge of racking your brain in a race against the clock.

Countdown timers can put the pressure on players in games, but in eLearning they’re a great way of ensuring courses are engaging and keep learners on their toes.

They’re also highly appropriate if you are teaching tasks that need to be completed at speed in real-life scenarios, helping learners to sharpen their skills and retrieve knowledge more readily.

At Gomo, we’re excited to have added this stylish new addition to our eLearning assets and features.

When you’re creating a course in Gomo, you can now simply drag a timer asset onto any screen from the asset sidebar. This gives you the ability to create time-based events and trigger them effectively within your courses.

Gomo feature: How to add a screen timer eLearning asset to your courses

Rather like planning an interesting storyboard, the screen timer eLearning asset allows you to choose when certain events will be presented to a learner on a screen.

For example, let’s say your learners are watching a video tutorial about a new product and you want to highlight what the key knowledge point of the tutorial is.

By adding and adjusting the screen timer, you could enable a piece of information to pop up on the screen precisely when that crucial information appears. A device like this works well to give learners that extra level of knowledge reinforcement.

To ensure the timing is exact, you can set the video to autoplay. Or you can add a button that starts the video and the timer at the same time.

Setting time limits on quizzes and assessments

Want another way to make quizzes more effective? The ability to set time limits on answers is a powerful tool.

Let’s say you want your learners to complete a short assessment after each module of a course. You could set them five questions, with learners given a maximum of 60 seconds to answer each one. If they fail to pick the correct answer within the time allowed, the question will be marked as wrong.

Like all of the eLearning tools in Gomo, the screen timer comes with plenty of features and functionality.

When the timer hits zero, for instance, you can specify that any Gomo action takes place. This could be linking to another screen on the course, heading to an external website (such as a partner company site or a related resource) or linking to a file.

You can also link to a subscreen, show an image or lead to the course completion page.

Choosing the look and launch point of the screen timer eLearning asset

Once you’ve decided you want to use a timer and have set the amount of time available, it’s time to choose how the countdown will be shown to the learner.

You can represent the allocated time by a pie chart, bar chart or circle, and you can specify whether the symbol is accompanied by text or not.

You can even customize the way the time is measured on the screen. It might, for example, say “mins” or “secs” rather than minutes or seconds.

You can also set a delay before the timer begins. This gives learners a certain amount of time to read a question or engage with content before an event is triggered.

Setting the screen timer eLearning asset: What happens next for learners?

Not all learners will beat the clock and offer the right answer, so you may want to set a variable that takes learners to a certain page depending on their response.

While a correct answer will usually result in progress to the next question, it’s important to think about the action triggered for learners who answer incorrectly, or those who run out of time.

For example, if your learners fail to correctly identify where your company’s headquarters are, you could set an action to show them the correct location marked on a map of the world. Another option could be linking them to the ‘About us’ page on the company website or a useful article on their Intranet.

This is a great chance to think creatively and help employees to learn from their mistakes. Imagine you set a question in which the user has received all of the relevant information in order to quickly complete a customer booking, for example.

In that scenario, learners who fail to complete the booking within 30 seconds could be taken to an on-screen explanation of the correct steps they should have taken.

Making the most of all your eLearning assets

Whether you want to add timely advice to your training content or test how quickly learners can retrieve the course knowledge, our screen timer eLearning asset is an ideal way to make your content even more engaging.

As always with Gomo, you’ll benefit from full xAPI analytics, helping you to insightfully track learner progress and judge which areas of your learning may need your attention.