Why we sometimes put characters in eLearning

Key takeaways

• Every character in a module needs a job: model a behaviour, carry a scenario, show a consequence, or give a campaign a face.
• Researchers call an on-screen learning character a pedagogical agent, and a 2021 meta-analysis found a small positive effect on learning. Simple flat illustration performed as well as elaborate animation.
• Stylised characters let us show conduct breaches, bullying and safety failures without creating an unintended likeness of anyone on your payroll.
• One character set gets reused across the module, posters, emails, signage and leader kits, which is what turns a course into a campaign.
• Custom characters used to need their own budget line. We now include one or two in most of our standard eLearning builds where the design calls for them.

No, we don’t add characters to eLearning because somebody decided the compliance course needed a cartoon person pointing at things. That is not a brief we have ever accepted, or ever want to.

Characters do earn their place in learning design. They can demonstrate a behaviour, carry a story or stand in for the learner. A good one makes a difficult scenario easier to depict and gives a campaign a recognisable face. Used badly, they are decoration on a screen somebody has to click through anyway. This article is for the person deciding whether the next module needs one, and what to ask for when it does.

What a character is for

A character earns its place in a module when it can do at least one of these jobs:

• demonstrate a behaviour or model a task
• carry a realistic scenario the learner has to make a call on
• show the consequence of a decision
• guide attention through a process with a lot of steps
• create continuity across a series of modules
• give a learning campaign a face people recognise away from the LMS
• make a sensitive situation safer to depict
• replace stock photography that teaches nobody anything

When none of those apply, we leave the character out and spend the budget where it changes behaviour.

Sometimes a learner needs to see what good looks like

The four YENOM Finance Navigator characters, Jaxon, Cleo, Carlos and Imogen.

Workplace behaviour is easier to watch than to read about. A character can hold a difficult conversation, decline a supplier gift, spot a hazard or challenge a colleague. It can also get something badly wrong in a way the learner recognises from their own site.

Learning from examples has good support behind it. Hoogerheide, Loyens and van Gog compared worked examples with video modelling examples and found both supported learning. The benefit came from the quality of the instructional example, and not from the presence of a face on the screen. That distinction matters commercially, because you are paying for the design of the example. The character is how the example reaches the learner.

We built YENOM’s financial literacy program around four custom avatars called the Finance Navigators. Jaxon, Cleo, Carlos and Imogen each carry a different life stage and a different money problem. The learner works through decisions alongside them: a budget to build, a credit offer to weigh up, a hardship conversation nobody wants to have. The learner does the deciding, and the character makes the situation concrete enough to decide about.

Sometimes we want the course to feel like a person talking to you

Four illustrated leadership characters, a new starter, a frustrated high performer, a guarded senior and a mentor.

Richard Mayer’s research into social cues found that conversational language, a human voice and gesture change the way people process a lesson. Learners treat instruction carrying those cues more like a conversation, and they put more effort into making sense of it. Mayer reports deeper learning from conversational language across most of the comparisons he examined.

Researchers call an on-screen learning character a pedagogical agent. A 2021 meta-analysis by Castro-Alonso, Wong, Adesope and Paas pooled 32 effect sizes across 2,104 learners. Learning with an agent produced a small positive effect over learning without one. Simple two-dimensional agents held up as well as elaborate ones, which is worth knowing the next time somebody quotes you for full character animation.

The lesson we take from it is that the character has to be doing something. One that demonstrates, questions, reacts or carries a scenario supports the experience. One that stands beside six paragraphs of text looking cheerful has a much harder case to make.

Sometimes we don’t want Mary from Accounts

Nobody in this scenario works for you.

Workplace scenarios get awkward surprisingly fast. Meet Mary from Accounts. Mary has breached the Code of Conduct, bullied a colleague and ignored a safety procedure. Mary also looks oddly similar to someone who joined Finance three months ago.

Photography and realistic illustration both carry that risk. Stylised characters take it off the table. We can show the behaviour your policy prohibits without creating a likeness of a current, former or future employee. That freedom is worth a lot in learning about conduct, harassment, psychosocial safety, discrimination and workplace incidents.

For EnergyAustralia’s health and safety series we designed a cast of humanistic blob characters in hi-vis. They cover fatigue, drugs and alcohol, aggression from a customer and hazards in a workshop. The aggression scenes work because a stylised character can be shouted at without anyone recognising the shouter. The scenarios stayed human and the characters stayed fictional.

Sometimes a character carries the consequence

Consequence is the hard part of compliance learning. A policy states the rule, and a character shows what happens next.

Research comparing narrative and expository writing gives us a clue about why that lands. Clinton and colleagues pooled more than 75 samples and over 33,000 participants and found narrative material easier to understand and remember than expository material. No module needs a plot twist. A recurring character does give you continuity between an example and its consequence, and a policy statement on its own cannot do that.

We used the approach for a financial services provider whose whole focus was risk and consequence. The characters borrowed the cat-and-mouse structure of classic cartoons. The cat makes a questionable decision involving the mouse, and the consequence comes back to bite the cat. It gave us a simple way to explore cause and effect without producing another worthy corporate case study about Chris, a Relationship Manager.

Then the characters escaped the course. They turned up on posters, in an email sequence, and as human-sized cardboard cut-outs around the office. That ran for the two weeks of the mandatory learning campaign. The course had finished and the campaign kept going, which is one of our favourite reasons to build a character in the first place.

A character set outlives the course

Characters don’t have to live inside your LMS.

Once a visual language and a cast exist, the same set runs across:

• eLearning modules and microlearning
• posters and digital signage
• email campaigns and launch communications
• leader discussion guides and job aids
• printed workplace materials

That repetition is what builds recognition. Somebody sees the same character in the module, then in an email, then on a poster near the coffee machine. Every encounter points back to one learning idea. We design learning campaigns this way as a matter of course. The formal learning comes with the workplace touchpoints that keep it alive after the completion report is filed.

“Sometimes characters allow people to visualise themselves doing something, or visualise someone else performing a task in a safe way.”

Michael Peart, Managing Partner, Hungry Minds

Characters are not automatically good learning

The research does not say that adding a cartoon improves learning. Heidig and Clarebout reviewed the pedagogical agent literature and found mixed results. They warned against assuming that an agent lifts motivation or learning on its own. Mayer’s coherence principle is the other caution worth holding onto: material that is interesting without being instructive competes for the attention the lesson needs.

So the design question is never whether we can add a character. It is what job the character would perform. Here is the test we apply in a design conversation.

When we can’t answer the job question in one sentence, the character comes out of the design and nobody misses it.

Characters no longer need a blockbuster budget

Two illustrated characters shown in four different poses.

Custom illustrated characters once came with a fairly chunky price tag. The workflow ran through concept development, illustration, multiple poses and expressions, rounds of revision, and often specialist animation.

That equation has changed. Our instructional designers and UX designers combine illustration, AI-assisted production tools and lightweight development. They build a bespoke character system in a fraction of the time. So one or two simple custom characters now sit inside most of our standard eLearning builds where the learning design calls for them. A larger cast, more poses, animation or a character-led campaign adds a modest amount of scope. We price it before the build starts.

The technology made production faster. The learning design still comes first, because nobody needs Mary from Accounts 2.0.

Characters we have built recently

We have built characters for financial literacy, workplace health and safety, leadership development, child safety education and workplace wellbeing. The clients include Telethon Kids Institute, EnergyAustralia, Act for Kids and YENOM.

Two of the character sets are ours, and both are open to try right now. Flow and Whirl turns everyday workplace stress into a 90-second reset, with one character voicing the spiral and the other steadying it. Take a Beat teaches a leadership move, then puts you in the scene to practise it with a mentor beside you.

The cast runs from human avatars to beans in hi-vis. Every good one started with the same question: what can this character help the learner see, understand or do? When we can answer that clearly, the character has earned a seat at the table.

Talk to us about your next module

Send us the topic, the audience and the part everyone finds awkward. We will tell you what job a character would do here and what it would take to build. We will also say when your money does more good somewhere else. Our eLearning builds include one or two custom characters where the learning design calls for them. The conversation starts with your outcomes and never with an illustration quote.

Try the demos yourself, then book a 20-minute call to talk about your own.

Research behind our approach

• Castro-Alonso, Wong, Adesope and Paas (2021). “Effectiveness of multimedia pedagogical agents predicted by diverse theories: a meta-analysis”, Educational Psychology Review. Pooling 32 effect sizes across 2,104 learners.
• Heidig and Clarebout (2011). “Do pedagogical agents make a difference to student motivation and learning?”, Educational Research Review. A review of the agent research, reporting mixed effects.
• Mayer. “Principles based on social cues in multimedia learning”, in The Cambridge Handbook of Multimedia Learning. Covering personalisation, voice, image and embodiment.
• Hoogerheide, Loyens and van Gog (2014). “Comparing the effects of worked examples and modeling examples on learning”, Computers in Human Behavior.
• Clinton and colleagues (2021). “Memory and comprehension of narrative versus expository texts: a meta-analysis”, Educational Psychology Review. Covering more than 75 samples and over 33,000 participants.