Feedback in scenarios: Let them think!

29 January 2013 By 28 Comments

You’re at the county fair. Your kids are off watching the pig race, and you’re starving. There are only two food carts nearby. One sells deep-fried pork skins from a pot of bubbling grease, and the other sells sushi from a styrofoam cooler. You decide to buy the sushi.

As you hand over your money, a disembodied voice suddenly booms from the clouds above. “Incorrect!” it intones. “Unrefrigerated sushi can harbor zygodread, which can cause severe vomiting. You should never assume that a cooler at a county fair contains ice. It’s always safer to buy hot food that’s cooked in your presence, such as the pork skins. Try again.”

You’ve just met The Omniscient One. It’s the personality-free know-it-all that drones through most elearning. When it intrudes into decision-making scenarios, it sucks the life out of our stories and the brains out of our learners.

“I know everything, and you have no brain”

The Omniscient One (the OO to its friends) is a big fan of telling feedback, because it knows everything. It not only tells us whether it approves of our choice, it also explains exactly how we have sinned and what we must do to atone. Like the folks in your legal department, it believes that no adult can be trusted to draw even the simplest conclusion on his or her own.

An alternative: show the result

In the real world, we’d remember the sushi lesson best if we ate the sushi and then spent three very unpleasant days. In elearning, you could call this showing feedback because, well, the elearning shows (or at least describes) the results. The feedback isn’t a pronouncement from on high but is instead something like this: [Read more...]

Filed Under: Scenario design Tagged With: , , ,

Scenarios: What are they good for?

2 May 2012 By 30 Comments

“Why do you want to use scenarios?” your client asks. “Why can’t we use the quizzes that we’ve always used?”

Sometimes the best way to convince a client is to show them through examples. Present one of their quiz questions three ways, so the client can see for themselves the deeper thought required by a scenario-style question.

Here’s an example. What kind of thinking is required by each type of question?

1. Quiz question

Which of the following is the most secure way to carry sensitive data?

    A. On a laptop

    B. On a USB drive chained to your wrist

    C. On a CD titled “The Chipmunks Sing Disco Duck”

Feedback for incorrect answer: Incorrect. Try again.

2. Mini-scenario with correct/incorrect feedback

Bob wants to work on the salary data at home. He has a long commute on a train. How should he carry the data with him?

    A. On his laptop

    B. On a USB drive chained to his wrist

    C. On a CD titled “The Chipmunks Sing Disco Duck”

Feedback for incorrect answer: Incorrect. Try again.

3. Mini-scenario with “showing” feedback

Bob wants to work on the salary data at home. He has a long commute on a train. How should he carry the data with him?

    A. On his laptop

    B. On a USB drive chained to his wrist

    C. On a CD titled “The Chipmunks Sing Disco Duck”

Feedback for A: Bob falls asleep during the commute, and a thief steals his laptop and sells the data. Try again.

Feedback for B: Bob falls asleep during the commute. A thief sits next to him, plugs his USB drive into his laptop while Bob is unconscious, and later sells the data. Try again.

Feedback for C: Bob falls asleep during the commute, and a thief steals all his belongings. The thief breaks the CD into pieces in disgust and no one ever sees the data. This is the best choice.

Version 1, the quiz question, asks learners to regurgitate a fact with no context.

Version 2 puts the facts into a realistic context but directly tells the learner when they’ve made an incorrect choice. [Read more...]

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How to create a memorable mini-scenario

12 October 2011 By 21 Comments

Often we’re told, “Put this information into a course.” But what happens if we put the information into a job aid instead, and then design mini-scenarios that help learners use the job aid?

This approach not only keeps boring blather out of our elearning, it can also make our activities more memorable. Here’s how it could work.

Example

Let’s say we’re designing a course on needle safety for a hospital. A common approach would be to display some slides of information about dos and don’ts, and then to present a generic fact check, like, “What’s the best way to dispose of a used needle?”

Instead, we’ll plunge our learners directly into an activity that somewhat simulates real life and that includes real-life job aids. So here’s the first thing learners see in this module.
Magda has pricked herself with a needle that she just removed from a patient's artery. What should she do?

We’re tempting the learner to respond without thinking, but we’ve also given them access to more information. For example, the learner could click the first thumbnail to see the safety poster that appears in every examining room and that explains what to do with a needlestick injury.

But our sample learner thinks, “Everyone knows you pour Betadine on that kind of wound,” and they choose that without looking at any other information.

Here’s the feedback we give them. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Elearning examples, Instructional design, Scenario design Tagged With: , ,

Sample branching scenario + cool tool

12 July 2011 By 43 Comments

Branching scenarios can be a pain to design. Happily, you can use a simple tool called Twine to easily draft the scenario and produce it. In this post we’ll look at a scenario that I wrote to demonstrate Twine’s basic features and to make a point about teaching through stories.

In the scenario, you’re a journalist in a hurry to get to a hot story in Zekostan, and your “guide” can’t speak English or drive. You have to quickly learn the necessary Zeko terms to navigate the roads and respond to events along the way. The scenario was inspired by a language-learning activity designed by Kinection.

Try the activity, keeping in mind that it’s a casual, unfinished experiment. Then come back here for more about Twine and my design decisions.

Twine

Twine works in Windows and on the Mac, it’s free, and it publishes scenarios in easily customized, accessible HTML. It’s based on TiddlyWiki, a lightweight information management tool.

Each scene in a scenario is really a small record in a wiki database. The links you create determine the path that the learner takes through the records. Thanks, Steve Flowers, for pointing out Twine in the Articulate forum.

Here’s the flowchart view, which Twine automatically creates as you link your scenes (click for a bigger image):

Screenshot of Twine flowchart view

Twine offers some advantages over other ways to write scenarios. You can:

  • Quickly switch between flowchart view and story-editing mode
  • Link scenes using simple text
  • Add images and sound files and otherwise use HTML
  • Export the story in text format for review and proofing
  • Publish the finished story in HTML
  • Use simple codes to keep track of variables or limit learners’ choices (not shown in the sample scenario)

[Read more...]

Filed Under: Elearning examples, Featured scenarios, Instructional design, Scenario design Tagged With: , , ,

Scenarios: the good, the bad, and the preachy

28 February 2011 By 9 Comments

Decision-making scenarios work best when they require realistic decisions and avoid preaching. Let’s look at some examples.

Not a real on-the-job decision

Carla, a sales person, is meeting with Amit, a new customer. She shows him a megawidget.

“You’ll love this megawidget,” Carla says.

“I don’t want a megawidget,” Amit says. “I came in here for a microwidget.”

What is this an example of?

  1. Product Boundary Issues
  2. Customer Misvetting
  3. Courageous Upselling

What’s wrong with this scenario?

We’re not asking the learner to make a challenging decision like the ones they make on the job. We’re checking the learner’s short-term memory: Can they still recognize “Customer Misvetting,” which we defined three screens ago?

We’ve disguised a quiz question as a scenario. It’s better than a generic quiz question, but it doesn’t require the kind of thinking that learners need to do on the job.

Also, the question tests only whether the learner can apply the right label to a problem. It doesn’t test whether the learner can correct the problem.

A better question would ask what Carla should do, with the correct choice being the type of action that will correct a case of “Customer Misvetting.” Then we’d be testing the learner’s ability to recognize the problem and their ability to solve it.

A real decision

How is the following scenario different? [Read more...]

Filed Under: Scenario design, Writing tips Tagged With: , ,

How to design elearning that’s memorable and budget-friendly

19 May 2010 By 19 Comments

Need to make an impact on a budget? You might find some ideas in this presentation.

It shows five decisions you can make that will help you save money and create more memorable elearning. It’s split into five short videos for easy idea-snacking and to meet the restrictions of YouTube.

Highlights include a matrix that helps you decide if training will solve the problem (part 2) and an example of a storyboard that emphasizes activities, not information (part 5).

Here’s the first part.

These links go to YouTube:

Part 1

  • Super-quick overview of action mapping
  • “Awareness” and “tracking” aren’t good reasons to create a course

Part 2

  • Handy matrix to help you answer, “Why aren’t people doing what we need them to do?”
  • Will a course really solve the problem?
  • Example of a multiple-choice question and feedback that simulate the real world

[Read more...]

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Elearning example: Branching scenario

3 May 2010 By 69 Comments

You’re a US Army sergeant in Afghanistan. Can you help a young lieutenant overcome cultural differences and make a good impression on a Pashtun leader?

That’s the challenge behind “Connect with Haji Kamal,” a decision-making scenario that my cool client Kinection and I developed for the US Army. The online scenario is the homework part of a lesson plan that includes in-class discussion about how to build rapport across cultures. It’s part of a much larger effort in the Army to strengthen soldiers’ cross-cultural and peacekeeping skills.

Turn on your speakers and give it a spin, and then come back here if you’re interested in the design decisions behind the activity.

Connect with Haji Kamal

The goals

The activity is designed to be completed as homework before a culture class, and it includes a facilitator guide with debrief questions. Our goals were to model specific rapport-building behaviors and inspire class discussion.

To follow the “good” paths, you need to see things from Haji Kamal’s point of view, show respect and patience, and otherwise apply cross-cultural skills that will be discussed in class. You end up on less successful branches by making more ethnocentric choices. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Elearning examples, Featured scenarios, Instructional design, Scenario design Tagged With: , , , , , ,

Why you want to use scenarios in your elearning

24 November 2009 By 44 Comments

Imagine that you’re in a competition to overhaul an information-heavy course so it creates a real change in the world. What changes would you make? Check out this story-based presentation to see what one fictional company did.

How to save the world with elearning scenarios
View more presentations from Cathy Moore

If some type is too small, click the “full” icon in the player and you’ll get the big-screen version.

The presentation is an adaptation of a talk I’ve been giving at the Australian Flexible Learning Framework conferences. It’s designed to help people break free of the traditional information-first approach to instructional design.

One of the challenges with using the approach described in the presentation is that it usually requires more design time. Since many clients don’t actually measure the effectiveness of their materials and just want information put online quickly, it can be hard to argue for immersive scenarios. Have you successfully used scenarios? Did you have to convince stakeholders to let you use them?

Filed Under: Featured scenarios, Instructional design, Scenario design Tagged With: , , , , ,

How to steer your client away from an information dump

13 October 2009 By 21 Comments

For a quick overview of the Action Mapping process described in this interaction, see Be an elearning action hero. For in-depth help with applying this process to your own materials, check out the Elearning Blueprint.

How I designed and built the scenario

Some people avoid creating branching scenarios because they seem too complex. In case it’s helpful, here’s the approach I took. [Read more...]

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