Anyone responsible for developing e-learning probably knows about the eLearning Guild. Great people there...and they put on great meetings, too. The fall meeting, called DevLearn focuses on current and immerging development issues. Discussions will be both strategic and tactical, and there are lots of us gurus and experts who predictably collect into groups to share what's working and what's not.

The keynote presentations will get you thinking and there are more concurrent sessions available then you could ever hope to attend. It's three days of busy!

w/ will again be participating in DemoFest this year. This is where 30 different producers display one of their most interesting courses, demoing it everyone else that's there...kind of like one big, professional show and tell event!

If you're going to be at DevLearn this year, make sure to call my cell (612-669-4633) and let me take you to dinner on Wednesday night. We'll cover anything you want, related to serious games and immersive learning...and dinner is on me!

And if you can't make it to DevLearn, call me anyway, we can have a virtual dinner, at the very least. For dessert,  I'll show you the immersive simulation we did for BFGoodrich tires...the same one I'll be showing at DemoFest.

Once a year, we like to ask our different groups of learners what they think about our courses. We ask them what they like and what they don't like. We also ask them what improvements in performance they've seen as a result. Then we go one step further and ask their managers what results they've seen. That's level 2 and 3 feedback...the best we can do without imperical measurments, which are tough to come by. So many factors come into play, it can be next to impossible to isolate the results of our elearning. Still, the feedback we do get can be valuable in helping us deliver the most effective solutions possible.

Recently, we asked a group of learners about the 3D immersive simulations and avatars we develop for sales training. Here's the data...

Nice results. The avatars and sims are valued. But what other results can we put our fingers on? Well, this is what managers told us they see in the behaviors of salespeople, as a result of our training:

Now, the big question: Did the courses actually increase sales? Again, this is the managers talking (with almost the same response as the salespersons themselves):

On average, the increase in sales is just over 8%. Even if this is half right, that much increase in sales turns out to be a great ROI. Now, let's turn to one more question, about what learners like best about the avatars and simulations.

To us, these numbers are pretty satisfying. It says we're on the right course, and we'll use the feedback to go even further in this direction.

We'd love to hear what results you may have gotten with simulations. Or, if you've got any questions we can answer, we're here to help. What's the right strategy for using avatars? How is the instructional design different in simulations? How can we take these results and apply them to our specific needs? Just post a comment here, or connect with Jack, at the phone number or email address below.

Recently I was asked to make a presentation on elearning best practices for the elearning SIG of the Minneapolis ASTD chapter. Approaching this from a client perspective, what emerged was a collection of tactics and tips that the w/ team uses to save time and money, while improving results.

You can see this in a podcast, just below. If you want to quickly breeze the topics first, scroll down...they're bulleted at the bottom.

• Aim at business goals. Business goals should be at the center of your target for each course. And the ring next to the bullseye is...
  
  
• Scope and process. Find out why and how we re-engineered one client's elearning practices to be 20% more effective...
  
  
• Make it modular. Modular design gives you more flexibility and saves time and money. There are a couple of ways to look at this...
  
  
• Reuse your content. Plan to get double the mileage from your elearning. For instance, building two doors into the same content...
  
  
• Repeat and retest. We've all used repetition in courses to improve learning. Learn how creatively retesting can support learning...
  
  
• Practice, practice. eLearning is uniquely powerful at providing a chance to practice (and fail) in making critical business decisions...
  
  
• Avatars add impact. These characters connect with learners at a very human level. They increase trust, credibility, retention...
  
  
• Measure what matters. Forget assessments for a moment. Survey learners to see if you're achieving important business goals...
  
  
• Be learner-centered. Make your learners more successful and the ROI is relationships of trust, commitment, and real results...
  
  
• Rethink your LMS. Most company’s LMSs are two sizes too big for their needs. Think simpler and less expensive, if you can...
  
  
• Network and share. None of us is as smart as all of us. Keep networking with others, and share what works for you...
  

Thinking about the last point, please feel free to share what works for you in the blog at www.wslash.net. Even better, we'd like to know what your challenges and objectives are. That would give us a way to demonstrate what we mean when we say w/ is elearning not as usual.

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In the past, I don't know, 10 years, we've talked carefully about different ways that people learn. Not bad conversations. In fact recognizing things like (regardless of learning style) we can confuse learners by offering them both text and audio at the same time is really important. Understanding the power of visuals in learning (because most people are visually oriented) is important to outcomes, too.

But how do we learn best? Read all you want...watch all you want...neither will ever replace good practice.

Luckily, when it comes to enterprise elearning and performance, much of what we need to practice is good decision making.

Input--Process--Output. Each step of the sales process (or any process), provides some sort of input, results in some sort of output, and in the middle, demands thinking and decision making.

All the product information in the world doesn't make a successful salesperson. All the training in the world doesn't either. You gotta get out there and practice. But before you practice live, practice where it doesn't matter...where mistakes don't cost you a sale or a customer. That's where avatars, or computer generated characters come into play.

At w/ we create immersive learning simulations where salespeople interact with characters on-screen. We use Codebaby characters because of their body language and ability to convey emotion. Our learners overwhelmingly tell us that using these characters:

• Makes different customer types more real for them
  
• Brings selling demonstrations to life
• Will increase their sales more than other elearning

Not bad results, right?

As we put our simulations together, we make sure that learners have a chance to fail. When their decisions are off the mark...just a little, or a lot...that's when the real learning happens, because it gives us a chance to provide appropriate feedback. If they don't have a chance to fail, they don't really have a chance to learn.

As you might expect, there's a lot less learner stress with this kind of practice than in live role-playing (which, of course, also has its place). And because it's online, the feedback is always consistent, too.

If you go to our homepage you can see a quick demo movie that shows the use of Codebaby avatars in several different courses. You can also visit with Matt Taylor in our Virtual World Headquarters. Or give us a call. We'll take you on a personalized tour of work that will help you think of ways we can help your salespeople practice making the right decisions in a safe environment.

Whenever I tackle anything new, especially if it's big and new, I like to examine what I know and what I don't know. What the givens, are and what remain variables. In a way, it's like sorting the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, where the edge pieces are the givens, and everything else is a variable.

Here are some of the ideas that we consider givens in simulation design:

• We use simulations to provide safe practice in making critical decisions (with our clients, mostly soft skills, but sims are excellent for mechanical or other processes, too)
  
  
• We use avatars to make soft skill simulations more social and engaging (this social sensibility also gains us trust and credibility with learners)
  
  
• Avatars can demonstrate, coach or role play with the learner (all are valid roles, depending on the learning objectives and social setting)
  
  
• The more real-world we can make the simulation, the better results we will get (something to remember here is that the real world may not be simple or predictable, so neither should sims be)
  
  
• In a simulation, if learners don't have a good opportunity to fail, they also don't have a good opportunity to learn (the real advantage to building in failure is that you can help learners discriminate between small, but important, concepts and options)
  
  
• The simpler, more streamline we can construct the simulation, the more learning time will be available (when there's value in it, people will go through a sim more than once...so don't use up more time than necessary; this gives them more time to practice)
  
  
• The construction of the simulation should give the learner the same sort of options, process, flow as the real situations (even while designing in failures and demanding critical thought, you don't want to trick the learner) 

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.