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: ,

Get a daily instructional design idea

30 August 2010 By 5 Comments

I’ve been tweeting a daily idea to spark your instructional design creativity. To get your daily ID idea, follow me on Twitter. (I don’t say much!)

Some recent tweets in the series:

  • Ask your SME, “What are the 3 most common mistakes people make?” Turn them into branching scenarios.
  • Using a story? What challenge is your character facing? Make them suffer!
  • Are you solving a performance problem, or are you just turning information into a course?
  • What are you creating to support your course? Job aids? Guidance for managers? Follow-up discussion? Additional tips in emails?
  • Teaching a complex procedure? Course: How to use the job aids. Job aids: Everything else.
  • What compelling scenario can you use to start your course? P.S. “A new employee is wondering…” isn’t compelling.
  • Have your learners finish an almost-completed problem, then take away support in stages until they’re flying solo.
  • What do you really want? “Describe the Heimlich maneuver” or “Save lives?” Don’t stop at declarative knowledge.
  • How can you turn a dos/don’ts list into something more memorable? Try short scenarios that show the results; have learners draw the conclusion.

I use the #IDideas hashtag, and other people sometimes chime in with their own ideas. You can see past ideas here.

Image © iStockPhoto: mattjeacock

Filed Under: Instructional design, Scenario design, Writing tips

Less text, more learning

26 January 2009 By 30 Comments

Do stakeholders want to add text to your materials? Here’s one study you can use to show how wordiness can hurt learning.

The study compared three lessons about the same weather process. All lessons used the same illustrations but varied in the number of words.

The lesson with the fewest words resulted in the most learning.

Bar graph

Read the original publication (PDF) from the Journal of Educational Psychology, or see the summary on pp. 109-115 of Efficiency in Learning by Ruth Clark, Frank Nguyen, and John Sweller.

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

Why you do not want to sound like a robot

19 January 2009 By 14 Comments

Robot“We shouldn’t use contractions because then people won’t take the content seriously.” Sound familiar?

Or maybe you’ve heard this: “We shouldn’t use contractions because they’re confusing for people who speak English as a second language.”

The result of these beliefs can be robotic chanting like the paragraph that you are reading now. I will not use contractions as I say that sometimes we become obsessed with details of grammar that are not actually useful, and as a result of this obsession we do not see the big picture. We are too busy enforcing small rules that do not help the learner, so we do not realize that our learner is thinking, “I will leave this course now because this text I am reading did not come from a human being.”

“They won’t take it seriously!”

Here’s what Ruth Clark and Richard Mayer have to say about “conversational” style in e-Learning and the Science of Instruction: [Read more...]

Filed Under: Writing tips Tagged With: ,

Too basic? Chop it!

15 October 2008 By 9 Comments
Filed Under: Instructional design, Writing tips Tagged With:

How to get everyone to write like Ernest Hemingway

7 October 2008 By 15 Comments

Probably everyone on your team agrees that elearning should be concise and lively. But does everyone agree on what “concise and lively” looks like? Here’s one way to get everyone on the same stylistic page.

Quantify, quantify

When we talk about writing style, we can get bogged down in personal preferences that are hard to communicate. But if we use readability statistics to quantify style, it’s easier to guide writers.

I’m not talking about the nearly useless “ninth-grade reading level” requirement in your corporate style guide. Instead, let’s look at the Reading Ease measurement that’s part of Word’s readability check. It’s a much more practical guide, especially if you compare your score with that of familiar publications.

Reading ease scores of several publications

What does this chart tell us? [Read more...]

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Can your learners wing it?

31 July 2008 By 14 Comments

Musicians at a jamYou’re standing in the Daniel Boone National Forest wearing 97 chiggers and a banjo. You’re surrounded by old-time musicians, and they’re playing this tune:

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

(“Natchez Under the Hill” as played by The Fatted Calf String Band)

You want to play along. But you’ve never heard the tune in your life. What do you do?

If you answered, “Pull out my copy of 10,273 American Old-Time Tunes and read from the book,” you would be very, very wrong.

To join the jam, you need to be able to play by ear–you need to be able to wing it. You need to adapt the rules you’ve learned from other old-time tunes to this new situation.

To transfer their learning to their jobs, your learners need to be able to wing it, too. They need to apply the rules they learn from your courses to new situations that you could never foresee.

Unfortunately, it’s hard to teach people to wing it. It’s easiest to just tell them what to do, but what we need to do is to teach them how to think.

What’s wrong with telling them what to do? [Read more...]

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

Dude or droid: What makes dialog realistic?

16 April 2008 By 11 Comments

How good is your ear for dialog? Find out with Dude or Droid, a simple drag-and-drop activity I created to try out Dragster.

As you decide who said each blurb, notice the cues that you’re responding to. What makes dialog sound natural, and what makes it sound stiff?

Click the image to start the activity, and pretend the “TRIAL” watermark isn’t there. Then come back here for some dialog tips and a mini-review of Dragster.

Dude or droid: What makes dialog realistic?

What did you notice about the dialog?

In the droid’s lines, you probably saw these symptoms of unnatural dialog: [Read more...]

Filed Under: Writing tips Tagged With:

Which verb will keep your learners’ interest?

10 April 2008 By 11 Comments

Click the green arrow to help determine the next celebrity verb!

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How to fit the entire world in a multiple-choice question

21 March 2008 By 17 Comments

Makeover logoCan’t afford a full-fledged simulation? You can still recreate the learner’s world in your materials, even if your only tool is the lowly multiple-choice question.

Let’s say you’re writing materials for people who create custom pet hedgehogs using genetic engineering. You might be tempted to write a question like the one below.

Before

It’s a good idea to include parrot genes in a custom hedgehog.

  1. True
  2. False (correct)

How could you make this question more realistically reflect the learner’s world?

First ask yourself, “Why does the learner need to know this fact?”

Then write a question that tests both the learner’s knowledge of the fact and their ability to apply it in the real world. “What if…” questions come in handy for this.

After label [Read more...]

Filed Under: Elearning examples, Instructional design, Writing tips Tagged With: , ,
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