Somewhere along the way, the eLearning industry quietly redefined the word "engagement". It used to mean a learner who is thinking. It now too often means a learner who is clicking.
You know the modules we mean. Click each tab to learn more. Flip the card to reveal the answer. Drag the label to the box. Slide the slider. These interactions are cheap to add in any authoring tool, they demo well to stakeholders, and they produce a comforting illusion of activity. There's just one problem: learners aren't responding to them. They're click-click-clicking through with the enthusiasm of someone dismissing cookie banners, while the actual content, the thing they were meant to learn, sits underneath: unloved, unread, and usually unwritten by anyone whose job was writing.
We want to make the unfashionable argument: the quality of the content has taken a back seat to the packaging, and the packaging was never what made learning work.
Great writing is its own engagement engine
Think about the last book that kept you up past midnight. No flip cards. No drag-and-drop. Yet you were more engaged than any module has ever made you. When the writing is good enough, the subject almost doesn't matter. A gifted author can make you care about anything (entire bestsellers exist about salt, fonts and the shipping container). That grip is engagement in its true sense: attention, curiosity, the need to know what comes next.
Well-crafted content also escapes the pigeonhole of authoring-tool limitations. A beautifully structured explanation works on a phone, in a PDF, read aloud by a screen reader, or pasted into next year's new platform. A clever interaction lives and dies inside the tool that built it. Write something genuinely clear and compelling and you own an asset. Build an elaborate click-fest and you own a maintenance problem.
What the learning science actually says
This isn't just aesthetic preference. The research is unusually one-sided.
Richard Mayer, the most cited researcher in multimedia learning, spent decades testing what helps people learn from screens. His coherence principle is blunt: people learn better when extraneous material is excluded rather than included. Across 14 experimental tests, learners given lean, focused materials beat learners given the same materials plus interesting extras in 13 of them, with a median effect size of d = 0.97. In education research, where most interventions scrape d = 0.2, that is an enormous effect. And it points the opposite direction from where most module budgets go.
The same literature has a name for interesting-but-irrelevant additions: seductive details. Decades of studies, aggregated in multiple meta-analyses, find they reliably reduce learning, partly by diverting attention from the material that matters. A decorative interaction that doesn't carry meaning is a seductive detail you can click.
And if you suspect production gloss is the answer instead, a study of 6.9 million video-watching sessions on edX found learners' median engagement with a video was at most six minutes regardless of its length, and that informal, personal videos out-engaged content produced in a multi-million-dollar TV studio. Polish didn't win. Directness did.
None of this says interactivity is bad, to be clear. Meaningful interaction, the kind where a learner makes a decision and sees its consequence, is some of the best learning there is. The research target is decorative interaction: clicking as content's chaperone. If the interaction would survive being replaced by a well-written paragraph, it probably should be.
The uncomfortable truth about our industry
Here's the root cause, said with love, because we work alongside learning designers every day: most learning designers were never trained as writers or editors.
They're trained in pedagogy, in tools, in project wrangling, in stakeholder diplomacy (a dark art deserving its own qualification). Then they're handed forty pages of subject-matter-expert content and a deadline, and the path of least resistance is to break the SME's paragraphs into chunks and distribute them across interactions. The writing, the hard, skilled work of turning expert knowledge into prose a busy human wants to read, never happens. Engaging, clear, concise content is genuinely difficult to produce. It is a craft, with techniques and standards and an apprenticeship, and it's the craft most module budgets allocate precisely zero dollars to.
So the interactions multiply, because adding a flip card is something a deadline allows, and rewriting the content properly is something it doesn't.
What "engagement" should mean in your next module
When you review your next build, try swapping the checklist:
- Not "is there an interaction every three screens?" but "would a busy, intelligent adult keep reading this voluntarily?"
- Not "did we use the template's full feature set?" but "did we cut everything that doesn't serve the learning goal?" (Mayer's research says the cutting is the work.)
- Not "how long did they stay in the module?" but "what can they do afterwards that they couldn't before?"
- And the simplest one: read the content aloud. If it sounds like no human has ever spoken those sentences, no flip card can save them.
Content first. Always.
Engagement was never about interactions. It's about respect for the learner's attention: content worth reading, written by someone who knows how, trimmed of everything that wastes their time, with interactions reserved for the moments where doing genuinely beats reading.
That's the standard we build to in our digital learning work, where the writing is the engine and the tool is just the car body. If your modules are interactive everywhere except the place it counts, the fix isn't another slider. It's a writer.