Category: Learning Experience Design

Show Me the Money: Building a Rock-Solid Business Case for eLearning

by Erin Krebs

By now hopefully, your company’s leadership team has bought off on the concept of e-learning as a cost-saver. We know it reduces time spent off the job, eliminates costly travel costs to attend instructor-led training, and allows us to learn the same amount of content in a shorter amount of time. But what do you do if you’re still not getting the financial and personnel resources you need to make your e-learning projects come to life?

Well, as we learned with our friend Jerry Maguire, it’s time for a little game of “show me the money.”

I’m going to help you do this by walking you through six key steps:

  1. Identify the need, and frame it up in a way that leadership can understand.
  2. Craft the solution benefits and objectives.
  3. Give them options.
  4. Break it down by what’s needed now and in the future.
  5. Show them the ROI.
  6. Identify all other tangible benefits.

If you’re looking for even more detail and tools, check out my Infoline through ASTD. There’s even a handy-dandy template that walks you through applying these six steps to a project for which you’re looking to gain buy-in.

Identify the need, and frame in a way that leadership can understand.

You may be seeing the problem from the learner’s or the manager’s perspective (“They don’t understand how to do X.”), but that’s not enough. We have to look at it from the business perspective as well. By not knowing how to do X, what business impacts are we seeing? Does it impact customer satisfaction? Employee retention? Productivity loss? Gain an understanding of your organization’s strategic goals, and then determine how the learning solution can have a positive effect on those goals.

If you are proposing a shift from instructor-led training to e-learning, identify the specific issues with the current training and how online learning can solve them. Is it inconsistent? Costly due to travel or time off the job? Challenging to track?

Craft the solution benefits and objectives.

Once you have the problem(s) clearly articulated from a business perspective, you can begin to list the e-learning program’s benefits to address these issues. Incorporate two to four benefits in one to two coherent, concise paragraphs. Then drill down further by outlining your objectives. Be specific about how your program will have a positive effect on your company’s strategic goals, business operations, and the employees who will take the training.

Give them options.

E-learning comes in all kinds of flavors: Which is the right fit for your program? Synchronous or asynchronous? Limited interactivity or highly interactive? Nano-learning or gaming? Examine your audience, their environment, and the learning objectives, and identify a budget range that will be acceptable to executives. Then do your research and craft two to three options. (If you are working with e-learning vendor-partners, you should get some great strategies from them that fit within your budget.) Providing options allows executives to weigh in on the choice, and demonstrates the effort and thought that went into your business case.

Break it down by what’s needed now and in the future.

Your executives are going to want to know precisely how much they need to commit to bring your program to life, from finances to labor. To do that, you’ll need to know how much time will be needed to bring the program from conception to launch, if you’ll develop it internally or with outside vendor-partners, technology needs from software to hardware, and what will be involved in communicating and marketing the training to employees.
Be sure to include a realistic timeline as well. Yes, everyone wants everything yesterday, but setting clear expectations at the start will help you avoid the pressure to cut corners and diminish quality down the line. Consider your team’s culture in terms of turnaround time for feedback and making group decisions; this can greatly impact a timeline and is a common cause for delays. Again, this is something that your vendor-partners can help you craft. Love them or hate them, Microsoft project managers are known for estimating the length of a project, and then adding 30{d89e4f83f6b6a066fc09cee339cefb53fa8e17050e8090b978ce7abfcf69967c}. If e-learning is new to your organization, it’s important not to underestimate the duration of the project.

We often focus on the costs of getting training in front of employees, but forget to include the long-term costs for maintaining the training and any refresher training that may be needed. Consider how often the training will need to be updated, and how you will accomplish this. Consider LMS maintenance, and any ongoing licensing fees needed to support the training. Thinking about the future costs (which typically decrease dramatically year after year) will also speak to the long-term return-on-investment for the program. Which brings us to…

Show them the return-on-investment (ROI).

Transitioning from classroom learning to e-learning provides us with the simplest ROI calculation: just look at cost savings from shortened training time, reduced travel costs, and administrative fees. If you’re creating a new program or upgrading an existing e-learning program, look at what your company might save through regained productivity, reduced employee turnover rates, and/or increased repeat customers due to higher satisfaction.

Identify all other tangible benefits.

Beyond specific cost savings, there are likely other benefits of your e-learning program you can readily identify. Does it pave the way for new business opportunities? Help achieve your company’s strategic goals? Does it make up for something that your previous program (or lack thereof) was missing? Be specific, and include numbers whenever possible.

After walking through these six steps, you should have a solid foundation for a proposal that will make you look like a rock star and have your executives ready to sign up for your vision. Include an executive summary that lays out the key points — if meeting with the approval team is part of the process, you’ll use these again for your presentation — and use tables, bullets, and easy-to-read formatting. Last step? Have an eagle-eye colleague proofread it for you! Typos and grammatical errors will ding your credibility, so make sure it’s right before you click send.

It will feel great when you’ve gotten the approval to move forward. Break out the champagne, because the fun is about to begin!

Mobile Learning: Is it Right for Your Organization?

by Catherine Davis

This post was written with the support of our Director of Engineering, Misha Milshtein. Misha helps support our clients with innovative ideas that bring their visions to life!

Here we are, right in the middle of mobile learning (or m-learning) revolution, taking our learning on the go. But even if learning can be done on mobile devices, should it? On those smartphones, with their tiny screens? Mobile learning can be a great strategy for many organizations for specific types of content, but any successful strategy is one that is thought through and well-executed. A good consultant will take a deep dive with you to address if m-learning is right for your organization. Here’s a glimpse into some of the consulting the SweetRush team does with our clients when we identify the perfect learning solution for their needs.

The Opening Question

First things first: When our client says “mobile,” we immediately ask a follow-up question: What exactly do you mean by “mobile”?

  • Will the majority of the learners take the course on a computer, but you want the flexibility for use on an iPad tablet?
  • Or do you truly want a learning experience designed to take place on a mobile phone?

Why do we need to ask these questions? While many innovations have resulted from the rise of m-learning, a few misconceptions have come to light, too. One is the notion that with a single process or a single authoring tool, courses can “work perfectly everywhere.” Or, more fervently, “mobile distribution will automatically and unilaterally answer all the prayers and satisfy all the audiences!” Unfortunately, this is not the case: when you see a course, an app, or a website that “works everywhere,” you are seeing the result of many hours of hard work by development and testing teams. These teams ensure that the end product is formatted correctly and is functional on a multitude of devices, platforms, and screen sizes.

When you develop…

  • A website, you have to create code that considers these platform, browser, and screen-size variations. This can significantly complicate maintenance because, when changes are made, these variations need to be considered and retested.
  • An app, you may to recreate several versions of the same content to satisfy the requirements of each platform.
  • A product that depends on displaying an abundance of tiny details on-screen, you have to apply a different strategy and redesign specifically for smartphones, where tiny details may simply become unreadable.

By demystifying this common misconception, we can now make sure that we’re on the same page with our clients, and look at these two paths in the light of their objectives, content, budget, and timeline.

Let’s Talk Tablets

Once we all recognize that making the end-product work on every platform can be a labor-intensive undertaking, clients often prioritize accessibility on desktops and tablets as a winning strategy for their learning program. And, in our experience, iPads tend to be the preferred device.

Our next step is to explain — and demonstrate — the differences in the functionality and user experience between the desktop and the tablet, and how we strive to bring both experiences as close together as we can. We do this not by simplification, but by constantly pushing the technological envelope, and making sure that both experiences are rich, interactive, engaging and — most importantly — educational. Some of the specific techniques we use are with larger buttons, no functional dependency on rollovers, less content on a page, and mobile-appropriate practice activities.

Hello? We Need This Training on the Smartphone

Naturally there are cases when delivering training via smartphone is the optimal solution, such as for learners on the go, who need on-demand access to quick hits of information to effectively do their jobs. As good consultants, we let clients know that the mobile phone is not an exact replacement for desktop e-learning. We have found m-learning to be a fantastic support mechanism for on-the-job support resources such as a knowledge base, job aids, or an FAQ.

So, how do we make effective m-learning when the platform is so different than a desktop? We take a completely different approach!

  • We “chunk” content differently (into much smaller chunks).
  • Our designs leverage more non-interactive elements, such as animations with audio, videos, etc.
  • Drag-and-drops that we know and love on the desktop just don’t translate well on a phone, so we replace them with more phone-appropriate interactive elements.
  • We recognize the use and significance of rich media elements, specifically video, and use them in m-learning solutions to the fullest extent.

Learn more about our approach to m-learning right here on our website. We would be honored to discuss your unique situation and mobile options to support your business initiatives, and analyze the perfect learning solution for you: Give us a call!

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Lessons Sixth Graders Taught Me About Adult Learning

by Jo.Coulson

I know adult learning theories. I’m skilled in instructional design and a master of curriculum models. I’m an expert in the facilitation and evaluation of learning. I am a learning professional! (Cue superhero music…)

Then I was asked to create a course for sixth graders.

They told me the goals were simple: Create an elective for the sixth grade using project-based learning. Use all the academic disciplines (English, math, science, history, art, and music) to demonstrate practical application in the real world. Incorporate a project that will introduce career education, teach project management skills, and instill teamwork. (Teamwork? Have they met any sixth graders?) Also, I was told to keep in mind that these students are “only 12 years old” — a phrase I later learned meant they were smarter and more creative than most adults I know.

How hard could it be? (BTW, this phrase will be the inscription on my tombstone someday.)

Before I tell you what they taught me, let me give you a little brief on the course. The students were to write a business plan to open a candy store, and then present it to “investors” for funding. Three teams — Finance, Marketing, and Products/Distribution — had to find a location based on demographics, create a floor plan, decide on a store name, create marketing materials, decide what products to sell, and determine the cost. Each team worked on specific tasks, but they had to work together as a group to make decisions and make sure everything worked together. They learned a great many lessons, but then so did I.

Lesson 1: I taught them basic project management skills and was questioned extensively on my experience in PM and/or opening a candy store. My lesson: Don’t try to pull anything over on them: the little twerps grilled me about my credentials!

Lesson 2: We played a team-building and problem-solving game where they had to get one piece of candy from Point A to Point B. One of the obstacles was that the teacher (me) grabbed one piece of candy and ate it, so they had to start over. This happened four times, which they were all too happy to report, but they did finally complete the task. My lesson: Apparently teamwork doesn’t apply to the teacher. (Note to self: next time, don’t bring chocolates.)

Lesson 3: To meet the science requirement, we decided to teach about crystallization, so we made rock candy in the classroom. Just think: sugar-water everywhere. They are still cleaning it up. My lesson: (This one came from the students.) Find a different science experiment.

Lesson 4: We built-in accountability to each other, not to the teacher or a grade. They took it very seriously and kept each other on task. And they did so in a respectful manner with surprising little emotion in spite of raging 12-year-old hormones! My lesson: Peer pressure can be positive!

Lesson 5: We gave them a few Internet resources to get them started, but they found a ton more than I ever thought existed. My lesson: The next time I need to do research, I’m calling one of them.

Lesson 6: They were given an opportunity to present to “investors.” One of the students scheduled to present was unexpectedly out that day, but her team didn’t miss a beat. Had they not apologized for her absence, we never would have known. Their presentations were thorough and incredibly creative. My lesson: (This one is my favorite.) Give them the opportunity, and they will rise to the occasion.

As I reflected on this incredible experience, I realized there were parallel lessons for those of us who spend most of our time creating programs for adults.

  1. Credibility: Our clients expect us to be both skilled in our profession and have at least a working knowledge of their business.
  2. Teams: Creating the right obstacle can teach more than problem-solving: it can build a team. (Except if you’re the teacher I guess!)
  3. Experiential learning: It’s a great teaching tool; just make sure it’s manageable.
  4. Accountability: Responsibility to each other can be a strong motivator, especially when the outcome is shared.
  5. Resources: Don’t think you have to supply all the resources. Teach the learner to find them.
  6. Accomplishment: Create the opportunity, and you’d be amazed at what a group of individuals — regardless of age — can accomplish.

And the final lesson for those of you who are worried about the future: don’t be. I’ve met the future and it is very bright!

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Unearthing Gems: Subject-Matter Experts and Tacit Knowledge

by Cindy.McCabe

Star performers, master salesmen — really any kind of subject-matter expert (SME) — know what they know based on years of experience. They’ve seen many situations, solved many problems. From a training perspective, the value these experts bring is their developed understanding — not only of what they do, but, more importantly, why they do what they do.

When working with subject-matter experts, these areas of “tacit” knowledge are often the most difficult to mine. By definition, tacit knowledge is more challenging to explain because it can’t be explicitly stated and written down like a fact. Yet these gems can make the difference between a learning experience that simply imparts information and one that inspires improvement, growth, and change by providing the deeper context.

A recent experience, outside of my day-to-day working with SMEs in corporate settings, made me pause to consider the challenge of unearthing tacit knowledge. My husband, Mark, is a math teacher, and he tutors students for the AP Calculus exam. Part of the AP exam is free response: students must solve problems to demonstrate their knowledge of the subject. As Mark has learned, there are many AP prep books and programs out there that teach the what — both of calculus and AP test tactics — but there is a dearth of available guidance that gets to the why — how to think about calculus problems.

Mark’s goal is to help students analyze a problem, not answer a question. So, he set himself to a task: he worked every AP Calculus free-response problem in the last 10 years… not to understand the what — he already knows the what — but to help him get to the underlying why. Doing this has allowed him to extrapolate back to the set of guiding principles that appear in the AP exams, and he’s categorized each problem (and problem subpart) by principle type.

From this, he’s developing side-by-side solutions for each AP free-response problem:

  • Down the left side of the page, he provides his thought process — the why — by explicitly writing down how he thinks about solving the problem using one or more of the guiding principles.
  • Down the right side of the page, he provides the what — the solution steps that he would show on the AP exam itself, with whatever time-saving tactics the AP exam allows for.

Now, getting a SME to commit to this kind of effort probably isn’t realistic for most corporate training efforts. But you can use the same approach in interviewing SMEs. Here’s how:

  • Ask the SME to provide several examples of common issues. You’re not looking for the black-and-white situations; you’re looking for the ones that are shades of grey, where the SME had to apply judgment. Ideally, you want three or four examples per topic.
  • Let the SME explain what he or she did, and probe for the why. Why did you choose to do that as opposed to something else? What in your experience told you that was the correct approach? What factors did you consider? Which are the most important? Least important? If X changed, how would that change your thinking?

Ultimately, what you’re trying to get to are those guiding principles that the SME is using to make a decision based on a given set of circumstances.

I’ll be honest: it’s not easy. Most tacit knowledge is so ingrained that SMEs don’t even realize what they know. But if you can dig for these diamonds, it will make your training sparkle.

Hot Plate! 3 Ways to Avoid Getting Burned with Mobile Learning

by Erin Krebs

I love fajitas. Vegetarian fajitas, beef fajitas, shrimp fajitas… all fajitas. I love them at home, on the road — and even better at our local, completely un-authentic Mexican restaurant. When fajitas are served, the waiter always reminds you not to touch the plate. This is smart, because those suckers are HOT!

Hungry yet? Good, let’s move on with the analogy.

Serving up fajitas is a lot like serving up mobile learning. When working with clients new to mobile learning, I often find an intense focus on what’s playing on the mobile device, and not the device itself. We are so focused on the tasty goodness that we forget to focus on the “hot plate” it’s served on, resulting in us digging in to quickly and getting burned.

Here are three things to consider at the onset of a mobile learning initiative and tips for ensuring you don’t get burned!

1. The cost of BYOD

Watch out for: If you’re like most of my clients, you’re not issuing iPads to everyone in your company. This means, in most cases, everyone you’re deploying this mobile training to is bringing their own device to the table.

Just like a summer BBQ that’s BYOB, everyone brings a little something different to the party, and mixing them up only ends in a headache the next morning. It’s the same with mobile devices. Every learner is accessing the training from a different device, and despite leading industry tools’ claims to be able to publish for all mobile devices with ease, it’s just not yet reality. Of course it is possible to build something that really does run on any device, but this is financially intense and requires significant amounts of usability testing, and in most cases it’s not worth the cost.

Overcome this by: Conduct a mobile analysis at the beginning of your training project, ideally before you’ve set the budget.

During the mobile analysis, ask your learners to share what devices they’re using and their preferences for mobile learning, and then use this information in your learning design. You may find the majority of your learners use a specific type of device, and you can design for just that device. Or, you may find you’ve got 20 different mobile devices to deal with, and you can build a path forward that accommodates this diversity.

2. Unlimited data

Watch out for: We use our mobile devices when we’re being mobile: riding the train into work, chilling at the ballpark while one kid plays t-ball and the other finds a dirt pile… you get the idea. This means we’re often not connected to a wireless network and are using our data plan.

Do you think your employees want to suck up their data-bytes completing a mandatory training? Let’s be real: They’d rather post pics of their kid — human or four-legged — on Facebook.

Overcome this by: Consider the impact mobile learning may have on your learner’s data consumption if you’re not paying the bill. Look at ways to decrease download sizes for m-learning, and encourage learners to use WiFi connections when completing their training away from the office. Some simple communication here can make a big difference in learner satisfaction with the delivery of the training.

3. Clicky, clicky, crash!

Watch out for: Mobile learning is awesome, and we are big fans of it here at SweetRush. But you have to match the content to the delivery method, both from an instructional and a practical sense. We’ll stick with the practical for the moment: I’m sure you’ve surfed the net and come across a totally cool video that has 7,000,000 “likes” on Facebook. You are totally psyched and then — crash — the video doesn’t play.

The same thing can happen with your mobile learning. If the training module you are trying to share with your employees isn’t playing well on the mobile devices they use, you’ve now gone and spent your boss’s budget on a training that isn’t being used because your learners can’t even get it to play. Snap!

Overcome this by: Get your IT experts on-boarded early in the design phase, understand the file size constraints that you have, and develop for the lowest-common denominator. Doing so will help your learners take the training in one step and not get sucked into the “loading, loading, loading…” vortex. By taking a few minutes at the beginning of your design to make smart decisions, you’ll be making both your learners and your IT team happy at the same time — the Holy Grail!

Here at SweetRush, we want all of your mobile learning dreams to come true. And, let’s not beat around the bush: We want to be the ones that help you make these dreams come true. But, whatever you do, don’t get lost in the sizzle of your mobile learning piece, and then forget some of the more practical matters, like how you serve it up.

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Storytelling Techniques for Complex Simulations, Part Two

by Cindy.McCabe

If you’re an instructional designer who loves a good novel or a compelling movie, writing for complex simulations gives you a great opportunity to flex your own creative writing muscle. The first part of your job, of course, is to get a firm grasp on the business drivers, the performance gap, and the training objectives, and develop a brilliant simulation design. Then it’s time to roll up your sleeves and get into the nitty-gritty of the story.

In Part One of this post, I offered some tips for character and plot. Below I’ll dig a little deeper into two techniques you might remember from creative writing classes: foreshadowing and climax.

Give Them a Taste: Foreshadowing

In complex simulations, learners need to make decisions based on multiple choices available to them. They need enough information to make those decisions, but not so much that you’ve given away the answers. The best way to do this is to determine what the decision is and what the possible outcomes are in advance. Then, work backwards to identify what information you need to disclose to learners. Disclose only so much information that learners can reasonably foresee the consequences of their decisions.

Here’s an example: let’s say we have a simulation that focuses on how to handle difficult situations as a supervisor. The learner will need to make a series of decisions about what to say to an employee (let’s call her Judy) in a one-on-one conversation. As preparation, the learner will speak with a few of Judy’s colleagues to better understand her performance and impact on the team. During these conversations, the learner will glean bits of information about Judy’s personality and her reactions to different situations. When the time comes for the one-on-one conversation with Judy, the learner won’t know exactly how she will respond and react, but the previous conversations allow the learner to foresee how Judy might respond, which informs the learner’s decisions.

Avoid the Crash and Burn: Climax

What makes simulations such an effective training tool? Well, one reason is simulations offer learners a safe environment to practice – and yes, make mistakes. Learners can try out different techniques without being afraid of harming relationships with colleagues or customers, messing up a system, or deleting important data. Learners learn as much from their mistakes as they do from getting it right!

As discussed in Part One, just before the end of the story, we want to introduce the major obstacle and allow learners to use what they’ve learned to bring the story to a positive conclusion. The build-up of drama and major conflict is the “climax” of the story. It should be a challenge to complete, and it’s probable that they will make mistakes. Here’s the key: we don’t want to leave them in a “crash and burn” situation, which is demotivating. We want to give them an opportunity to recover from their mistakes.

In video games, gamers attempt to finish a series of “levels” to successfully complete the game. And in many games, if you mess up too badly, you die. Imagine if that was the end of the story! You’d throw your controller down and give up on the game.

Instead, you get to restart and try that level or that challenge again. Take a cue from video games in your complex simulation and allow the learner to try again, or give them a path to recover and learn from their mistakes.

Karl Kapp, author of The Gamification of Learning and Instruction, offers 12 great ideas for how to help learners who don’t “win” in his blog post, “The Emotional Toll of Instructional Games.”

How have you used foreshadowing in your complex simulations? How have you provided ways for learners to recover from their mistakes? I’d love to hear your thoughts! Please share in the comments.

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A Few of My Favorite Things: Beyond Drag-and-Drop to Maximize Learner Engagement

by Kerri.Simmons

Drag-and-drop. Multiple-choice. Matching. These tried-and-true activities have become the staples of e-learning. To me, they’re kind of like the coat and shoes you use to walk the dog: They have their place, serve a purpose, and get the job done, but they shouldn’t be your first choice when you need to really dress to impress!

Now, we all know that engaging the learner is essential to the success of every e-learning program. Including interactive elements increases the effectiveness of the training, capitalizes on the latent strengths of digital media, and increases the ultimate ROI of the training investment. Basic activities such as a simple drag-and-drop do fulfill our objective of having learners stop, think about what they’ve learned, and demonstrate their proficiency with the material. Box checked.

But let’s say your objectives are more complex: Rather than just demonstrating knowledge, you need your learners to acquire new skills, or you want to teach them to think critically. To get learners to engage at these higher cognitive levels, you need to carefully construct activities that challenge them in new ways.

Another reason to move beyond drag-and-drop is your audience. In today’s corporate world, we are seeing an influx of new learners (Millennials) who are knowledgeable consumers and users of digital media and games. Growing up with computers and video games means these learners have higher expectations about interactivity out of the gate, which means keeping them engaged requires more-complex activities. (Read more about this in Tips for Training Millennials.)

So now that you know some of the reasons your dog-walking coat might not work so well for your dinner business meeting, how do you show up looking sharp and turning heads? Let me introduce you to a few of my favorite things:

Discovery learning
Discovery learning can take many forms, but it is essentially structuring information in an e-learning course so that it is found rather than presented. Participants learn through active participation, rather than by passively receiving information in a presentation format. They learn from both their successes and their mistakes, which keeps them engaged. An example of this is teaching a new software program: Rather than take learners through each type of task step by step (which can be tedious), we give them a task to complete, and then provide tips and feedback as they try to complete it. This is done in a simulated (and safe) environment, of course!

Goal-based scenarios
These types of scenarios remind us of choose-your-own-adventure stories. We set up a certain situation, and provide the learner with a goal to complete. As they make decisions to try to achieve the goal, different consequences ensue. The decision points impact the evolution of the story. Learners may need to evaluate documents or interview other characters to find the information they need to complete the scenario successfully. Coaches may be used to provide tips or highlight key concepts along the way.

Avatars
Studies show that the addition of a virtual character (an avatar) to e-learning courses impacts knowledge retention, course completion, and recall of content. By interacting with a character in a virtual world, learners become more engaged in the subject matter, helping them learn more effectively. Virtual characters increase learner potential through prompts, summaries, flash cards, practice tests, and interactive scenarios, while delivering training in a more interactive and entertaining format.

The list doesn’t end there: We use social simulations, frame games, immersive learning simulations, and many more techniques to maximize learner engagement, knowledge retention, and application of learning on the job. With so many rich, engaging e-learning activities to choose from, one of the best parts of my job is opening our closet and finding the perfect fit!

Tell me… What are a few of your favorite things?

Flex Your Creative Muscle: Storytelling for Complex Simulations

by Cindy.McCabe

Character, plot, foreshadowing, climax… with a quick glance, you might think this post is about the Great American Novel or the next hit indie drama. No, I’m not writing to you from a tiny room in Paris hunched over a typewriter, nor am I in a slick writer’s room in Hollywood. Yet writing for complex simulations does require dusting off those techniques you learned back in creative writing class. After you’ve internalized the business and instructional objectives and gotten a solid grasp on the subject matter, it’s time to turn your inner writer loose. Here are some tips from my experience to help you along.

Got To Be Real: Characters in Simulations

Think about who the “stars” of your story will be. (Let’s see… Brad Pitt… Oh, excuse me, got carried away there.) Put your learner in the position of the protagonist — the main character and the “hero” of the story. Then write the parts for one or more antagonists that pos2ee conflicts. Though the name “antagonist” might conjure up certain feelings (as in the word “antagonistic”), these characters aren’t meant to be evil. They simply have different perspectives or goals that create challenging situations for the learner.

Characters need to feel real in the context of the learner’s experience. By building character profiles, you can create backstories for each of them. These backstories will help explain their unique perspectives and views that are different from the protagonist’s. You’ll want to keep these brief, but they do add depth and richness to the story.

Characters’ actions should remain true to their perspectives. Referring to each character’s backstory as you write will help you frame how he or she should respond in a given situation. A character that behaves in a certain way shouldn’t suddenly change behavior. That’s not to say that a character can’t change his or her mind about something. Hey, we all have realizations and epiphanies, right?

Building the Story: Plot

Think beginning, middle, and end. At the beginning of the story, introduce the learner to the simulation’s setting, most or all major characters, and the overall situation and objective. Bring in your challenges or obstacles in the middle of the story: There may be several minor obstacles to overcome that build toward the major obstacle (the climax, which I’ll describe in a future post). Then use the end to provide a conclusion to the story: Recap how the learner resolved the challenge and reinforce what was learned. Getting creative, you might include “credits” or brief snapshots of the characters’ futures (“where they are now?”)!

Achieve balance when creating obstacles for the learner. Overcoming obstacles should be attainable, but not easy. For example, you might require that learners look up the answer in a knowledge management system, or in a document they’ve picked up along the way in the simulation. (This type of challenge also gives learners exposure to and practice using a tool or reference material they need to use back on the job.) In this case, you want to give enough information to ensure learners can find the answer, but not provide the direct link or page number where the information can be found.

How have you used characters and plot devices in storytelling for simulations?

Check out Part Two, where I discuss foreshadowing and climax!

Tell Me a Story: How to Captivate and Educate Your Audience

by Catherine Davis

What makes content engaging? Courses need to sparkle, or your message goes in one ear and out the other. We add stories to help capture the imagination. That’s a great start. Then we add an avatar coach to guide us and provide narration. Nice idea. It feels like we need to connect the dots and have our avatars act as characters playing out those stories, however.

As a strong advocate of wheel enhancements and not reinvention, I did a bit of research on telling stories within e-learning courses. (This research was done on the Internet from my comfy recliner. See my earlier blog for details on my tumultuous affair with research.) I wanted to find some formulas for creating storylines and developing characters within courses, even if I had to draw from script-writing techniques used by the entertainment industry. Low and behold, I was able to find exactly what I needed — even streamlined for the e-learning audience! The following is a brief summary of a fantastic article by Karen Westmoreland Luce, called “Creating Great Stories to Enhance eLearning.”

There are four, basic, building blocks of any story in an e-learning course:

1) Triggering event. The triggering event is always the first and most-essential element in any story. It’s the problem — and it’s used to set up the context of the story. Sometimes it’s part of the story, and sometimes it’s the background of the story. Answering these questions will usually give you the basis for your triggering event:

  • What is the problem that this lesson is supposed to address?
  • What is the learning objective for this course?
  • Who is my audience for this course?
  • What details about this event will make it familiar to learners and their real-world situation?

2) Plot. Plot lines are often recycled. How many times have we seen such recycling in movies or on TV? Cop dramas since the 1970s come to mind for me! You can use the same basic scenario or plot over and over to illustrate a point. The time and place, characters, and details change. We just have to fill in the right details to our audience and our situation. Basic plots have five main components:

  • The situation or problem tells why you are telling the story in the first place; for our purposes, this is usually our triggering event.
  • The rising action is where most of the story occurs. This is where we introduce our characters, outline the problem and details, and build to decision point.
  • The decision point is where the character is forced to take one course of action or another. In e-learning, the decision point is directly tied to your learning objectives.
  • The desired course of action reinforces the objective and goal of the course — the behaviors that we want the learner to demonstrate on the job.
  • The outcome or resolution provides the closure for the story.

The original article offers a great brainstorming worksheet for these five components to help you walk through the process.

3) Characters. In creating characters for your avatars, you must give your learner a good sense of the character, but do so without sliding into stereotypes.

Using archetypes can be very effective in helping you work out your characters. In literature, we often see classic archetypes: the hero, the villain, the goddess, and the innocent. In e-learning courses, we see archetypes such as the novice, the expert, the mentor, and the skeptic.

Once you have a framework for your character’s purpose in the story, it’s easier to fill in the details of who that character really is. The original article provides another great worksheet; this one for developing characters.

4) Setting. The setting is the visual backdrop for the avatar characters in your course. You should work with your creative designers to generate the right visual environment. Again, look to your target audience and learning objectives to help figure out the setting. Make a rough sketch and include details you would see in the scene. (Annotated boxes in PowerPoint® are adequate for you non-artist types like me.) Challenge yourself to draw something representing all five senses: touch, taste, smell, hearing, and sight. Visit the setting and create a description. For example, if it is a retail setting, visit some local stores and write down notes. Listen to the conversations between customers and store associates.

The type of story you are using and the learning objectives for that story will determine how much of each building block you need. Keep in mind that all courses are a stage, and all avatars are merely players.

Having Your Cake and Eating It Too: Designing for Multiple Mobile Devices

by Erin Krebs

This week, I’ve been partnering with a large client in a couple of different areas of its organization. One group within the organization is developing a very hip and visually interactive game to teach sales associates about the company’s products. The other group is developing a simple mobile application that’s essentially a product catalog listing the basic features (e.g., pricing, etc.) of their many products. This also serves as a tool for sales associates.

When meeting with the customer to review the proposal for the mobile application, the client posed a great question: “Why is the cost so much more to develop my simple mobile application than it is to develop an interactive, whizzy game?” Smart client.

The answer is simple and as easy as cake to understand. Let’s start with the background, and then we’ll get into the cake part.

A few basic elements impact the price of a product, be it an e-learning course, a mobile application, or a highly interactive game experience. Based on the complexity of these factors, your price goes up or down:

  1. Instructional approach – Elements like the length of the course, traditional lecture learning vs. immersive scenarios, and the number of activities and assessments, etc.
  2. Visuals – The amount of custom graphics, 3D vs. 2D, stock photos vs. a photoshoot, avatars, illustrated environments, and user interface (UI) design, etc.
  3. Engineering – Programming complexity (e.g., simple back/next features or a complex branching scenario with many levels), user navigation, and LMS integration, etc.
  4. Devices – The types and number of devices (e.g., employee laptops, iPods, iPhones, and Android tablets, etc.) on which the product needs to run.

In this case, one real kicker impacted the price: Devices. The game we’re developing is designed to run on a learner’s computer. Therefore, it just needs to be compatible with popular Web browsers. While the graphics and animations (think really cool 3D zooming and detailed product shots, etc.) are on the whizzy/fancy side of things, we only have to create everything once because it’s running on one type of device.

On the other hand, the product catalog is designed to be mobile and run on a variety of devices such as iPads, the iPad mini, iPhones, Android phones, and Android tablets, etc. While the visuals aren’t as complex, the engineering effort certainly is—not to mention the QA and testing that goes into developing a mobile app for so many devices.

Let’s use an analogy based on one of my favorite things: Cake.

Say you’d like to bake a chocolate cake. The ingredients you need are the same, whether you’re making a round three-tiered cake, a rectangular cake, or cupcakes. Your ingredients cost about the same more or less, depending on the amount of cake you want to have on hand.

However, if you want to bake all three types at once, you’ll need more ingredients and more tools (e.g., cupcake tins and cake pans, etc.), and it takes more time to assemble and decorate each cake type. For example, assembling and decorating a birthday cake is much faster than a wedding cake. Cupcakes take time as well, depending on the design you want to put on them and whether you’re using a filling.

The same goes for a learning product. The more formats you need, the more labor-intensive the product is to develop, thus increasing your investment.

When you’re on a limited budget, one of the best investments you can make upfront is a short analysis to determine the right mix of devices for your audience. Perhaps you don’t need a wedding cake, a birthday cake, and cupcakes; maybe you just need two of the three.

Now, if you’re like me, you’re really ready for a slice of cake!