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    2 min read

    Animation in e-learning: is it worth it?

    By Pacific Blue on Mon, Nov 14,2022

    Now, here's an interesting point that came up on one of our instructional design programmes recently. Is using animation in e-learning really effective? 

    A good question. It's time-consuming to produce and depending on the length and sophistication of said animation, it may not come cheap. So should you bother? 

    While I’d always counsel caution when it comes to looking at research, there are a couple of interesting studies done on this. One by Narayanan and Hegarty and the other by Mayer, Mathias and Werzell. 

    In each study, two sets of learners were given identical lessons explaining a process - with one difference. One lesson showed the process using an animation and one showed the process using a sequence of still diagrams. At the end of the lesson each set of learners took the same test. 

    What is so very interesting about this is the test results in both studies: no significant difference between the two sets of learners. In other words, the use of an animation didn't have any major impact on the effectiveness of the learning. 

    Can we extrapolate out from that and say animations make no significant difference whatever the subject matter? That's probably a bit of a stretch. 

    What we can say with some certainty, however, is that if your aim is to teach someone a process, spending a lot of money on creating an animated version of that process certainly doesn’t guarantee a significantly better learning outcome. 

    However, what I find most interesting is that there was no significant difference between using still and animated visuals. This is not a case of saying, ‘don’t bother with well-designed and integrated graphical presentation’. 

    What it does seem to be saying is that super-charging that graphical presentation, by animating it, won’t actually make a significant difference. 

    When we talk about e-learning we can all get carried away with talk of making it engaging; and animations are one way we might choose to achieve that engagement. 

    It’s always worth remembering that spending big on additional multimedia bells and whistles won’t necessarily have the positive impact on learning outcomes that we might wish for.

     

    If you are looking for help with designing and/or developing a piece of e-learning that only uses multimedia when it really counts, check out our service options.

    Topics: Instructional Design Course Design e-learning
    2 min read

    Blended Learning: is it just about choice?

    By Pacific Blue on Thu, Oct 6,2022

    A current societal obsession is the need for choice. More choice, we are told,  is automatically better. Sometimes true but not necessarily always. 

    In the case of blended learning this is sometimes distilled into a focus on simply providing a variety of delivery mediums. This focus is often driven by the belief that because some learners learn better through different mediums, the same piece of content or learning must, therefore, be available in all possible mediums. 

    A noble approach. But one that will keep you duplicating content for ever and a day. And which usually  ends up being an unsustainable burden. An unfortunate one, too.  Because there's a whole body of research which has established that, broadly speaking, as long as the learning is instructionally sound, the delivery medium makes little difference to the overall learning outcome.

    This research was carried out before people were really taking account of any accessibility needs, so that is one factor that could definitely change the overall picture.

    But in most cases, the ability to choose from a menu of delivery mediums will probably not make that much difference to the learning outcome.

    Better to be thinking about providing a well-thought through programme of learning that gets results. A programme that looks at what needs to be taught and identifies the most pragmatic medium for delivery for  a particular part of that programme.

    For example, core elements of a given piece of learning might benefit from classroom delivery, but beyond that other delivery channels might be better. For a refresher session, a virtual classroom or webinar-style session might be the perfect delivery medium. For complex skills where only a subset of the total  is used each time, short, highly-focused videos available at the point of need might be a suitable option.

    Working all this out isn’t necessarily easy, which is why we have developed our Frequency, Complexity and Shelf-Life Matrix to help take some of the guesswork out of these decisions.

    The key point. It is learning needs, aligned with the complexity, frequency and longevity of content that should guide the blend of delivery channels you choose.

     

    If you are grappling with instructional design for a particular delivery medium or creating an effective blend, take a look at our in-house and publicly scheduled instructional design training.

    Topics: Instructional Design Blended learning
    3 min read

    E Learning Design: Lessons from Breaking Bad

    By Pacific Blue on Tue, Sep 3,2013

    Great excitement and anticipation recently, as Netflix started to show the last 8 episodes of the US TV drama series Breaking Bad.

    If you're a fan of this award-winning series, you'll have followed Walter White's epic journey from high school chemistry teacher to creepy drug kingpin who 'cooks' the best crystal meth known to mankind.  The creator of the series Vince Gilligan describes this as a journey from 'Mr Chips to Scarface'.

    I've been a fan from the very first episode. And I'm sure, fellow fanatics reading this, can't wait to discover how the series finally twists and turns to its conclusion.

    If you've never even heard of Breaking Bad and you enjoy quality TV drama, then I'd encourage you to check it out. I'm pretty sure you won't be disappointed.

    And if you are already wondering what on earth any of this has to do with e-learning and instructional design, then let me explain.

    Like any good Breaking Bad fan, while I was watching the last batch of episodes on DVD, I just had to look at all the special features, too. The first one that caught my eye was called The Writer's Room.

    And how interesting it turned out to be. Apparently, on average, it takes a team of writers around three weeks to hatch an episode of this series.

    I'll just repeat that, in case it didn't sink it the first time. It takes approximately 8 people, 3 weeks to come up with just the outline for 45-50 minutes of television drama.

    The actual writing of that episode takes another 7 days or so. And the filming of the episode takes about 15 days.

    I have no idea how this compares to other TV series, but it  really highlights how  creating a quality product is a major task.

    But most striking of all? The three weeks it takes to work out what is going to happen in the episode. And this is just working out the plot. Satisfying yourself that you are creating credible actions and reactions for the various characters involved.

    Of course, I couldn't help but draw some comparisons with how people typically go about creating a piece of e-learning.

    For a single episode of Breaking Bad, in very rough percentage terms, that three weeks of creating the plot ( effectively the instructional design equivalent of analysis and design)  accounts for about 45% of the total development time. That's pretty astonishing.

    Try selling that percentage of analysis and design time to an e-learning client, internal or external. Chances are you'll be laughed out of the room.

    Very few people would be happy to accept that percentage of a project's time devoted to analysis and design.

    Of course, plotting out a TV series is not the same as doing the analysis and design for a piece of e-learning. For e-learning, you probably don't need 45% of the time devoted to these activities. But you could comfortably spend quite  a bit more time on this stage, percentage-wise, than most people usually do.

    So often, skipping over the analysis and design is the norm. Everyone would much rather skip over that and go straight to development.

    Which is strange. Because as consumers of TV drama, we all know a poorly plotted film with a crumby script that rushes to production is a disaster.  Yet we are quite happy to live with a poorly designed, badly scripted piece of e-learning that gets rushed to development. With predictable results.

    As I wrote last week, as long as we allow authoring tools to frame the e-learning development conversation (and process) we are in trouble. With this approach and mindset, we will be turning out the e-learning equivalent of B-movies or a TV series destined for the afternoon schedules. And we know how embarrassingly bad most of those end-products are.

    For the minority, who are willing to get deadly serious about the analysis and design of their e-learning, popular, performance-improving courses are the gratifying end result.

    With just a small shift in thinking and approach, more Breaking Bad quality e-learning is perfectly achievable for a lot more people.


    If creating great e-learning is currently top of mind for you and you'd like to get a sense of how your e-learning stacks up against some best practices, then take a couple of minutes to complete our Discover Your E-Learning Impact scorecard to find out how you are doing.
    Topics: Instructional Design e-learning e-learning software
    2 min read

    ELearning Design: Analogue Instructional Design in a Digital World

    By Andrew Jackson on Tue, Aug 27,2013

    Recently, I spent some time working with an e-learning development team, who by their own admission, had spent years producing nice-looking, but very boring, page-turning e-learning.

    I don't want to knock these guys. They knew they were missing a trick and they were keen and eager to do something about it. And there's no question that after working with them for just a couple of days, they are now much better equipped to produce actual learning - that will have the added bonus of looking good.

    But it struck me. Here are people who are totally at home in the digital world, yet their instructional design skills (such as they were) were very definitely of the analogue variety.

    This is an extreme version of a scenario, I come across all too often. People acquiring and enhancing their digital skills exponentially, but leaving their instructional design skills (if any) trailing far behind.

    Several decades into a brave new world of everything becoming digital, we still seem to be remarkably naive (or hopeful) about software's ability to solve all our learning problems. It's almost as if when we're presented with a piece of software for developing or managing learning, the common sense part of our brain disconnects and we go all gaga.

    No need to think. Just follow the steps of the software procedure and all will be well, we seem to think. If only we can get good at using the software, we all delude ourselves, all will be well.

    Nowhere is this disconnect more apparent than in the world of e-learning. Yes, you can become a Storyline or Captivate super hero. Yes, you might have mastered variables, layers and states. Yes, you might have found a work around to an obscure software glitch that the developers haven't yet fixed.

    But all this blue-caped super-hero-ness comes to nothing if all you are doing is producing sophisticated but vacuous pieces of digital output that your learners would rather not be wasting their time ploughing through.

    And I wonder why we are still seduced by the promise of the software. No-one would be daft  enough to believe that being really proficient with a saw, hammer, chisel and screw-driver would be enough to turn you into a master furniture-maker.

    Proficiency in using these tools and nothing else, would probably enable you to cobble together some very rudimentary pieces of furniture.

    But you would only start creating highly functional and attractive furniture after you had mastered some very different (but nevertheless complementary) design skills.

    Creating e-learning is no different. Master your chosen authoring tool all you like. It won't turn you into a designer of truly effective e-learning. It will simply make you a highly-proficient software user.

    Master the software and apply some digital-world instructional design skills? Well, then there's potential genius in the making.

    As long as software development tools are driving the e-learning conversation, there'll be many a page-turner churned out - to the dismay of your learners.

    To finally deliver on the promise of e-learning, means re-aligning and upgrading your instructional design thinking from analogue to the digital.


    Using Storyline for your e-learning development? Find out about enhancing your Storyline skills with some instructional design magic.
    Topics: Instructional Design e-learning
    2 min read

    Courseware Design: When SME Rockstars Just Don't Rock

    By Pacific Blue on Tue, Aug 20,2013

    We've heard quite a bit in recent weeks about our new 'rockstar' Bank of England Governor, Mark Carney. Well, today, I have a 'rockstar' story of my own to share with you today. A story about a subject matter expert who was supposed to be the rockstar of his subject matter world. - in this case systems analysis

    It was 1997. And there was great excitement all round because this great genius was coming to my university to give a guest lecture. (I was studying for a masters degree in systems analysis at the time).

    In the world of systems analysis, he was renowned for thinking outside the box, challenging the conventional wisdom and coming up with innovative solutions to sticky problems.

    At the appointed hour, we all shuffled into the huge lecture theatre ready for a memorable 90 minutes.

    And it certainly was memorable  - but for all the WRONG reasons. Because after only a couple of minutes, it became painfully clear the 'rockstar' just wasn't going to rock.

    He was quiet. Rambling. Obtuse. After about 10 minutes, I was completely lost. No idea about most of what he was saying. Overall, the 'rockstar' was completely oblivious to the needs of his audience. Completely wrapped up in the complexity of his own little world.

    And this story is an interesting one, because it's an extreme example of some very flawed thinking: that the smartest person in the room must be the best and only person to teach us the subject, or design the courseware to teach us the subject.

    What a big mistake. In most cases, the subject matter expert is almost always the very WORST person to take on either of these roles.

    And if you've ever worked your way through a piece of e-learning designed by an SME, you'll know exactly what I'm talking about.

    Yet in the worlds of both business and academia, the thinking seems to be that your brain simply can't fail to benefit from being exposed to another brain that's much smarter than yours.

    But as my story shows, if the smart brain is so wrapped up in its own complexity and cleverness, nothing much gets communicated. Confusion, boredom and disappointment are usually the only outcomes.

    And, by the way, my apologies if you belong to that small minority of SMEs who are also naturally gifted teachers and/or course designers. If that describes you, trust me when I say you are truly an SME rockstar.

    So what about if you belong the the majority? An SME who doesn't possess natural rockstar status? The good news? There is still hope. It's perfectly possible to make your knowledge and skills more accessible and their transfer to others more effective.

    You'll need to learn some new skills yourself. And you'll need to recognise your wealth of knowledge has to be constantly re-worked and re-calibrated each time you are designing or delivering a piece of learning, so it is suitable for different groups of learners and different delivery mediums.

    You'll also have to learn how to carefully structure and refine your knowledge and skills to make sure what you are designing or delivering actually results in useful, effective learning.

    But if you are up for the challenge, there's almost certainly a great piece of learning or two inside of you, just waiting to get out.


    Are you an SME designing courseware or delivering learning and you feel like you could do with some help? As a first step, check out our Instructional Design Essentials Checklist to find out your current strengths and weaknesses.
    Topics: Instructional Design Course Design
    2 min read

    Multimedia E-Learning: Cut That CEO Video Right Now

    By Pacific Blue on Tue, Jun 18,2013

     I recently listened to a great interview with Jonathan Hall. Jonathan spent years working in TV, starting life at Australia's ABC. Later in life he also worked as a learning executive at the BBC.

    These days, one of the many things he does is to teach and advise people in learning and development about how to make great videos for use in training.

    If you've ever been involved with using multimedia in e-learning, at some point in your career you will almost certainly have come across the senior person in the organisation who is determined to get his or her face onto the start of an e-learning package.

    You know the kind of thing. One of those 'inspirational' pep talks that is supposed to motivate the learners to work their way through the deathly boring e-learning that's about to follow.

    Now, we all know, most leaders are absolutely c**p at these kinds of videos. Cheesy doesn't even come close to describing how embarrassingly bad most of these efforts are.

    But because the person in question is the leader, no- one can tell them the awful truth. Or worse still, deep down, they know they are c**p, but the bevy of obsequious lackeys who make up their inner circle just egg them on to do the deed.

    Jonathan had some very clear advice for anyone thinking about doing one of these introductory videos: don't. Unless you are an absolutely gifted speaker or your message is so utterly compelling and relevant that people are desperate to hear it, you are wasting everyone's time.

    And the reason for this? These videos are plain boring. Most people will lose interest within about 8 -12 seconds. As Jonathan explained, there is no way you can make these videos interesting - only moderately less boring.

    Another reason for not using a talking head -  people quickly forget what has been said. Jonathan cited the example of a weather forecast. Apparently people do remember the maps and the graphics they see during the forecast, but most can remember very little of what the forecaster actually said.

    This is because, surprise, surprise, video is about showing things happening. And with a talking head, nothing much is happening. People don't watch a video to see nothing happening. Hence the low retention and rapid turn off of interest.

    And TV people know this very well. Mostly, when a talking head is used in a TV programme, either, the shots will be very short; or, you'll hear the voice of the person, but see shots that illustrate what they are saying.

    So next time you are faced with the prospect of including a talking head video in your e-learning, try using Jonathan's advice as an argument for not going that route.

    And if you are absolutely forced to include it, here are a couple of tips. Make sure you shoot with two cameras - one with a long shot and the other with a close up. That way you can at least cut between the two shots to provide some kind of movement and interest for the poor old viewer. See if you can shoot some interesting footage that illustrates what is being said, so you can cut to these shots at various points during the video.


    Need help with multimedia or any other aspect of developing your e-learning? Check out our popular e-instructional design modules.
    Topics: Instructional Design e-learning
    2 min read

    Scenario-based E Learning Design: Participant or Observer?

    By Andrew Jackson on Tue, Jun 11,2013

    It's mid afternoon on the second day of an in-house instructional design course. We've been focused on e-learning for the whole two days.

    One big problem this client of ours is grappling with: how to make product information effective and memorable. They are from a graphic design background and sort of fell into creating e-learning a few years ago when a major client asked them if they could.

    They are in an industry where glossy, sexy and downright over-the-top and in your face is the order of the day. They would be the first to admit that up until now their e-learning has been shed loads of style over not very much substance.

    To help them move away from glossy, attractive page-turners full of click to reveal and drag and drop, I've asked them to flip their thinking. We've spent the last hour thinking about how their learners might actually use this factual product information, rather than about how to make its presentation "engaging" (their usual focus).

    This has been extremely hard for them. They are several steps removed from the learners. It's never occurred to them to try to get closer. This alone has been a major 'light-bulb moment'.

    We've been slogging away, getting ideas on the flip chart. As they are several steps removed from the learners, some of this is just guess work. So a major post-training activity is to validate these ideas. Find out what the learners actually do with all the product info that currently just gets stuffed into a page-turning course. But overall, they are doing well.

    As we are going through this brainstorming process, I've been slipping in examples from pieces of e-learning that show product information 'in action' rather than as page-turning, factual content.

    After seeing several of these examples, Geoff, one of the course participants, came up with an interesting question. If you're creating scenarios that reflect how the learners actually use the product information, do you make the learner one of the active participants in the scenario or do you 'show' them a scenario and get them to evaluate it.

    We stop to consider this for several minutes. Putting the learner fair and square in the middle of the scenario makes the learning highly relevant and authentic. Unlikely your learner would fail to see its relevance. Great, also, for learners who can't wait to roll up their sleeves and have a go.

    On the other hand, some learners might be all too well aware of the hands-on from their day-to-day experience. They might actually value the opportunity to take a step back to consider what they do.  From this more reflective perspective, they would probably prefer to watch the scenario unfold and evaluate what's going on, as it happens.

    The only way you'll truly get to a decent answer to this question is with a good sense of how the majority of your target learners are likely to respond. If you work inside an organisation, you have a fair chance of really getting to know your learners.

    If you are a supplier, you may simply be blocked from doing this every step of the way. In which case you'll have to make some intelligent, educated guesses or build both approaches into your course.

    Knowing your learners can end up sounding like such an old cliche. But as this story shows, it's always a key element in creating authentic, effective e-learning.


    If you are grappling with making dry, factual information authentic and relevant for your learners, take a look at our free Effective E-Learning Toolkit:

    Topics: Instructional Design e-learning
    2 min read

    Instructional Designer Essentials: Making Learning Meaningful

    By Pacific Blue on Tue, Mar 26,2013

    You know the old adage. Those who can, do. Those who can’t, teach.

    Brutal? You bet. Eight short words that devastate. Teaching, training, learning (whatever you call it) is a waste of space. Anyone involved in it, is a second-rate loser.

    Unfortunately, those eight short words contain some truth. Look at secondary education. Why are good schools so over-subscribed? Because there are too many failing ones, chock full of teachers who are - well, not very effective.

    Higher education is not that different. It may be overflowing with clever people. But they are largely clueless about how to transfer their knowledge and skills effectively.

    And look at the world of work. Plenty of dreadful second-rate training going on there - frequently delivered by subject matter experts who know their stuff - but have no idea how to teach it effectively.

    Of course, it’s not all bad. But far too much of it is. And there’s a theme. Lots of clever people. Mostly eager to share their knowledge and skills. Clueless about how to do it effectively. They use a broken model, developed a long time ago, for a very different world.

    It’s a model which should’ve been consigned to the rubbish heap long ago. But it’s a model that just doesn’t seem to die. What am I talking about? Good old chalk and talk. Or perhaps more accurately in the 21st century, PowerPoint and talk.

    Why this model persists is a mystery. We know more about how to transfer knowledge and skills effectively than we ever did. We have the technology to make this happen more quickly and effectively than ever before. Yet we still struggle along using 19th century methods of teaching and learning.

    Here's the real problem. Subject matter experts think teaching is about helping people know lots of stuff. Learners usually need to learn to do lots of stuff. And that provides a clue to the problem. Because there's a huge mismatch between the focus of most learning events: all about knowing compared with the needs of the learners: more about doing.

    And the key to re-aligning that mismatch? Meaningful practice.

    Which raises the question, why is meaningful practice so absent from so much learning? Because it's hard to do well, if you don't know how. Faced with the challenge, subject matter experts in particular tend to side-step the problem completely. Much easier to throw a bunch of PowerPoint slides together and talk about them - at length.

    And why do lots of people involved with training find it hard to create meaningful practice? Because they are largely unaware of instructional design. The very guidelines, principles and techniques that would help them to create learning that has meaningful practice at its heart.

    If teaching or training is something you’re about to get involved with and you were thinking about using the PowerPoint and talk model; or, if you’ve been ‘PowerPoint and talking’ for a while now, there is an alternative way ahead.

    Our Essential Step-by-Step Guide to Instructional Design Success can’t teach you everything you need to know about instructional design in a dozen or so pages.

    What it can do is to set you on that alternative path. Steer you away from PowerPoint and talk. Guide you towards a better way of transferring knowledge and skills. Help turn your teaching, training or learning into something your learners look forward to, because they know it works.

    Download your free copy here.
    Topics: Instructional Design
    3 min read

    Why So Much E-Learning Feedback is Just Pointless Rubbish

    By Pacific Blue on Thu, Mar 7,2013

    One of my pet hates about e-learning authoring tools is how hard they make it to create meaningful feedback. For years now, we have been stuck in a world where 'Correct' or 'Incorrect' are the default options.

    Learners would (quite rightly) soon have something to say if a trainer stood at the from of the room and offered only these two responses. So why is it okay for these to be the almost universally accepted standard for creating feedback in e-learning?

    The good news? There are lots of ways to create effective, meaningful feedback for your learners in an e-learning package. The bad news, you might have to work a bit harder to get the responses in place. And you might have to avoid (or adapt) some of the ready-made interaction templates to get a better result.

    But in my view, if you think 'Correct' and 'Incorrect' are perfectly fine and that's all the feedback you are prepared to provide for your learners, maybe it's time to re-think your career?

    If you are up for the challenge of more effective feedback, what can you do?

    As an alternative, there is intrinsic feedback. This is something we are all familiar with. Insult your boss, swear at his wife, kick his dog across the car park and you'll get some pretty harsh intrinsic feedback. In this example, it will almost certainly be: the sack.

    Cross a busy road without checking the traffic first. You may get lucky and receive no feedback at all. But chances are your intrinsic feedback will range from a a few bruises, to broken bones, to serious injury or even sudden death. Ouch. There's some serious intrinsic feedback for you.

    Okay, some extreme examples here, but you get the idea. And think about it for a minute. Almost any action we take in life will have some form of intrinsic feedback. For instructional designers there's an important lesson. This kind of feedback is highly effective (unless it kills us, that is). We usually remember it. And in its more extreme varieties, it instantly changes our behaviour or thinking forever.

    In e-learning, if you put your learners in a realistic context or scenario, then you definitely need to be think about the related actions or decisions they could take and the intrinsic feedback you could provide based on what they do.

    So intrinsic feedback is a great alternative to just correct/incorrect, but it isn't always enough. This is where instructional feedback comes into play.

    First you get the authentic, contextualised intrinsic feedback which demonstrates the consequences of your decisions or actions. Then you get some more detailed guidance on why or how your decisions or actions where good or bad.

    In the case of the good, you provide some positive reinforcement. For the bad, you can highlight what to avoid in future and what to do instead. Here's a simple example:

    Situation: you have a sales prospect who fills in an enquiry form on your website about one of your services.
    Action:  The learner contacts the prospect 6 days after they have  filled in the form
    Intrinsic feedback: The sale is lost. The prospect has already signed up for a competitor's service
    Instructional feedback: When people are searching for a product or service online, it usually means they are in serious buying mode. The stats bear this out. There is a direct link between the speed of responding to a website enquiry and the likelihood of the enquirer becoming a customer. So when an enquiry comes in, deal with it fast. Or you will quite likely lose the sale to a competitor.

    Combine intrinsic and instructional feedback to help your learners really understand why their actions and decisions are correct or incorrect.
     
    Want to find out how your e-learning feedback (and more) stacks up against some best practices we cover in our impact and instructional design programme? Take our Discover Your E-Learning Impact scorecard to find out. It's completely free, only takes a couple of minutes to complete and you get personalised results almost instantly.
    Topics: Instructional Design e-learning
    2 min read

    What Reality TV Can Teach Us About E-Learning

    By Pacific Blue on Wed, Mar 6,2013

    If there's one thing we've been bombarded with over the last decade or so, it's reality TV. Love it or loathe it, you can't escape it. Or it's popularity.

    Of course, you might argue it should actually be called UNreality TV, given that many of the situations participants find themselves in are completely contrived. But there's no escaping the reality of the raw emotions  and reactions the participants exhibit as they work through the situations they've been placed in.

    So could we learn a thing or two from reality TV when we are designing e-learning? This might seem a bit of a stretch to some of you, but I think the answer is 'yes'.

    Why do I say that? Well first off, there's the big problem with e-learning: too much focus on knowledge of content, not enough focus on its real world application. And we all know the result. Deathly dull screens of content and a few predictable interactions, all guaranteed to bore your learners to death.

    While learning isn't always about doing, in a workplace setting, it's pretty rare for you not to have to do something with the knowledge or expertise you learn.

    So this is where the parallel with reality TV comes in. Reality TV is all about situations and how people respond to them.

    While we probably don't want our learners sobbing at their computer screens or plotting to do down their fellow learners, putting them in some reasonably authentic settings and scenarios and challenging them to respond to those situations, is a reality TV method we should most definitely think about adapting for our own e-learning purposes.

    And, by the way, this is not about creating expensive simulations or virtual reality worlds. With a bit of thought and imagination you can easily turn potentially dry content into interesting, realistic activity.

    As an example, last year I was working with some consultants in the retail sector. They wanted to create some e-learning to teach their learners how to carry out a process to analyse if potential clients were actually worth approaching.

    Their assumption at the start of the development was that the most we could do was tell learners  about the process and then test them on their knowledge of it.

    Instead I had them focus on what the learners actually needed to do at each stage in the process. No surprises, this turned out to be a handful of tasks each time. Then we worked out how to best re-create each of those tasks in an e-learning environment.

    In some cases it didn't take long to come up with an easy-to-create solution. In other cases, there was a bit of head scratching while we worked out how to simplify and adapt things within the constraints of e-learning.

    But the result? A very different package from the content-centric one they had initially envisaged. Not only did the learners  find out about the process, they also had chance to practice it. Just like they would have to back in the workplace.

    So a bit of reality e-learning provided relevant practice (not just testing of knowledge). It enabled learners to try out their newly acquired knowledge in a supportive, structured environment. And it meant learners went back into the workplace far better prepared than if they had just been told lots of stuff  and then tested on their knowledge of it.

    Like to discover more about making your e-learning authentic, relevant and applicable to your learners? Check out our on-demand webinar on this very topic: Re-Frame Your E-Learning to Increase Impact and Workplace Performance.
    Topics: Instructional Design e-learning
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