I recently had a client who had been reviewing different avatars tell me that they all seem the same. Granted, this person is in purchasing, not in learning, but the comment does bring up an interesting issue. What makes a good elearning avatar?

We've learned by experience that characters that are too photorealistic are creepy. That's because the rigging and animation always fall way short of the visual features, causing a distracting Max Headroom kind of dissonance.

Simpler characters compliment learning, rather than distract from it...and yet, too simple also gets back to being a distraction. So not photorealistic, and not the rather crude talking heads you sometimes see. And while there is certainly a place for 2-D characters, we prefer 3-D, for most applications.

Just as the voice can convey important emotional cues that add significant depth to a message, so can body language. That's why we like to see a character that can walk and gesture, and of course lip-synchs with the voice. 

When it comes to production, a good avatar is easy to work with and keeps ROI in mind. That's one of the main advantages to the Codebaby characters we use. We can change clothes and hair pretty easily...and they come already rigged, with a broad selection of movements and gestures for us to plug in.

Bottom line? The avatar is there to help create a more human experience. They make practicing a learning objective much more real and powerful. You need them to do that job without being a distraction, and without causing you more work than the project is budgeted for.

Prospects are always impressed by our full-body avatars, and for that reason we're quick to demonstrate them.

But as I joined in the selling process with a new client recently I was reminded that, while we're always thinking sims, that doesn't mean that we should always be thinking avatars. Here's why:

• A sim is used to, literally, simulate real life decisions to provide a learner with practice. Here, by the way, we design in options for failure. If learners don't have a good chance to fail, they don't really have a good chance to learn, either.
• But sometimes the failing and learning have to do with software or with repairing machines. When there is no interaction with people, there is no call for an avatar...no matter how powerful they are.

So, while we're always thinking in terms of sims these days, we're also quick to determine what soft skills are in play. No soft skills, no avatars.

And depending on the audience, we may choose to use avatars in only one section of the course. That would be true with boomers, more than any other age group. They appreciate working with an avatar in a role-play, but tire of having them around when it's not necessary.

We recently rolled out the first ILS (immersive learning simulation) that a large audience of retail sales people have ever seen...with fantastic results.

This is a group we've worked with for years, in a very successful program for a global manufacturer. And while you sometimes worry about tinkering with something that has been so successful, but both our team and our clients agreed that simulations could add great value and should be the next step in our program's evolution.

We chose to use computer generated characters, or avatars, from Codebaby because they are full-body figures and we can easily make them walk, sit, gesture and lip synch to the voice track. The combination of voice inflections (from our narration) and body language provide a very social, very human experience for learners. In all, this course utilized two characters for customers, one acting as a retail salesperson, and one as selling coach.

In the first two weeks, over 600 individuals in our learner population completed this course where they were introduced to different customer types (represented by different avatars). Putting this customer information together with new product information, learners were turned loose in two different simulated selling scenarios.

Learner decisions about what type of customer they were dealing with, and what feature or benefit would appeal most to their specific needs, put them onto one of six different solution paths. For each path, learners received feedback on their performance. And they were encouraged to go through each scenario more than once, to improve their selling skills.

When invited to participate in a survey on the new course format, over 90% of learners chose to do so.  Learners were overwhelmingly positive and told us that the agreed or strongly agreed:

• 84%...Actually meeting the customer characters made them more real for me.
• 88%...It was helpful to observe the retail sales character's approach to selling.
• 92%...The coach provided useful insights and advice on customers and selling.
• 89%...It was useful to actually practice selling the tire to customers.
• 88%...It was helpful to go through the selling scenarios more than once.

You can argue all you want about the value and/or definition of serious games vs. immersive learning simulations, but let's stick with just immersive learning simulations. No, in fact, let's just stick with immersive learning.

It's not that I'm not interested in simulations.  I am. But does elearning have to be a game or a simulation to be immersive? You want the learning to stick, and you want learners to be eager to return. Getting a learner immersed in the content and its presentation can do this, even without games or simulations.

A lot has happened in the 10 or so years since CBTs became elearning. Bandwidth for one...a huge change. Mobile computing, multi-player online games, avatars, YouTube, Facebook, del.icio.us, Google...all are huge changes that have an impact on elearning and how immersive it can be.

Boomers will be around for some time yet, but we are also seeing Gamers in increasing numbers. Talk about change! Having grown up with computers and computer games, these tech-savvy, information-hungry 18 to 34 year olds are described as digital natives. And their experiences change how they pursue, interpret and use information.

The way Gamers use the Internet makes them elearners, by definition. Gaming, Googling, Facebooking or blogging, they continually search out new information in a way that defines their lives. That may make back/next elearning boring for them, but it also opens up lots of options to engage, entertain and immerse them in learning.

Here are three ways that you can engage and immerse Gamers in elearning:

• Does content have to be linear? We know that interests and levels of competency vary from learner to learner, so why not make information available in randomly accessed chunks and let them proceed as they wish?
  
  
• Does learning have to be directive? Gamers (and even Boomers, by the way) love to discover information by searching and interacting with their digital environment. And learning sticks better that way, too.
  
  
• Are SMEs in short supply? Sometimes a big boost to elearning can be as simple as focusing on a topic by bringing different pieces of expert information (that are already on the web) directly to the learner. We don't have to create all the content ourselves, you know.

We're going to have to explore these (and other) options for engaging and immersing elearners in future posts.

This post summarizes a Stanford University study that was published in 2002. Like a lot of academic papers, it's well, pretty academic reading. But it makes a very strong case for the use of animated characters, or avatars, in online learning. And it has a ton of impressive research behind it. You can (download) this study from us, but below is the short version.

First of all, we are all familiar with the concept of social intelligence. It's well documented that the quality of facial and emotional expressions, along with speaking ability and other personal skills, result in greater or lesser degrees of engagement, trust and satisfaction during a social interaction.

According to the Stanford study, a significant body of research shows that the presentation of social intelligence is just as critical in online interactions as it is in interpersonal interactions. They make the point that people do not discount interactions as unreal, simply because they are on screen. Further, it asserts that interactive media automatically engages brain systems that are meant to evaluate social experiences. Therefore online characters that speak and interact with learners can create a more meaningful experience, increasing trust, satisfaction, memory and learning, and a willingness to return for more learning.

The study goes on to say that online characters can create a positive feeling towards the organization that sponsors the interaction, make people feel special, rather than one of a multitude of learners, and make the web less lonely. The study goes on to fortify these assertions in a list of 10 benefits to using online characters:

1. Characters make explicit the social responses that are inevitable in online interactions, giving us more control over outcomes.
2. Interactive characters are perceived as real social actors; we know they are not real, but we treat them as if they are.
3. Interactivity increases the perceived realism and effectiveness of characters, as it simulates human-to-human conversation.
4. Interactive characters increase trust in information sources, and research shows that when characters guide interactions, people trust the information more than in identical interactions without characters.
5. Characters have personalities that represent brands, create predictability and help to build relationships.
6. Characters can communicate social roles, thus making their function--as a teacher, coach, teammate, salesperson, customer service rep--clear, and improving the message and experience.
7. Characters can effectively express and regulate emotions, responding appropriately to learner interactions and adding impact and meaning to what is being learned.
8. Characters can effectively display important social manners, with polite greetings, effective encouragement, and even simple apologies...all making the interaction more human and more effective.
9. Characters can make interfaces easier to use because they make it more obvious where to find help, and more like getting help from someone down the hall than from a manual or help file.
10. Characters are well liked because they make online interactions more personal. When presented with only a single character for interaction only 15% of users dislike the character. When presented with a choice of multiple characters, more than 90% of people prefer interaction with the character, to no character at all.

The Stanford paper is well documented, referencing 36 different studies, articles and conference proceedings. It is well worth the read, if you have the time, but this summary gets to most of it. Bottom line, if you're wondering about using characters in your online learning programs...you can probably erase any doubts you previously had. Online avatars can crate immersive learning.