Hotspot: what they are and how to use them in an online course

Hotspots are buttons that are added to the slides of an online course to make them more interactive and engaging. They can take different shapes and be perfectly visible or invisible. The aim is both to help students with navigation and to present them with hidden information.

Here are some examples of how hotspots are used in an eLearning course.

Hotspots: shape and insertion

In English, the word hotspot means a point of attraction, a hot zone that attracts people and phenomena of a certain kind. If we talk about online training and authoring tools, the tools with which you create multimedia learning objects that can be read by training management platforms or LMS, hotspots are graphical elements with which you create interactions. You start from an image or a slide of an online course where you can insert, through the editor, points of attraction of various shapes: oval, circular, etc.. You can assign additional information to these hotspots, for example, by hovering the mouse over the point in question. The hotspots are visible to the instructional designer who prepares the course, but are invisible to students. Just select the position where you want to place the hotspot inside a slide, choose the shape and match a trigger, i.e. a triggering movement that can be precisely, hover over the point in question with the mouse, click etc.

Hotspot for browsing an online course

Some hotspots can serve to facilitate navigation within a slide and are an integral part of the interface. In the design phase, you can decide that some elements of the text remain hidden, while others can be explored through interactions. By clicking on a part of the screen, it is also possible that the student can jump to the next slide.

Increase interaction in an online course with hotspots

Whether invisible or navigational, hotspots play an essential role in student involvement. Thanks to these buttons you can push users to discover the information hidden inside an image, exploring its graphic elements. In the same way, you can verify the knowledge learned. For example, instead of creating a multiple-choice test, you can design an image in which the student must insert the right elements. It could be some components of a machine, the position of objects in case of fire to be placed with the "drag and drop" function, etc.

Hotspots are those invisible buttons that are activated by hovering over the mouse cursor, for example, and help students explore an image or slide. Their function in eLearning is precisely to make the courses more engaging, allowing students to learn or test their practical knowledge in a very intuitive way.

Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator