Inserting Humor in your Online Training Tests

I've heard arguments like this one before: use humor and fun, hip formats to engage and liven up your training. However, I've found there to be several big drawbacks to this:

1. Humor is subjective. You have to be careful when deciding what is funny, especially for training with a large audience. For example, if your audience is international, any humor you interject might not survive the translation process or, if it does, may not be funny in another culture.

2. Corporate humor isn't funny. Jokes rarely survive the review process. If you need to get approval for your course, jokes that survive past a panel of reviewers are typically the least funny of the bunch. In my experience, the most you can hope for in these cases is a hip irreverent tone that many might read as funny.

3. The format may not fit. The article uses the "Who Wants to be a Millionare" game show as a good example of a quiz, but, if memory serves, the only way to keep playing is to answer all of the questions correctly. The main purpose of an elearning quiz is to get the user to demonstrate that they know the material they've just covered, and you're not going to know if this is true or not unless they get to answer all of your questions.

I'm a big fan of humor and fun formats as much as the next guy, but when it comes to business training, you have to be very careful how you use them or you may find that it decreases the effectiveness of your training.