This short presentation provides results and general design principles from what we call x-learning...a form of e-learning that relies on eXamples, eXploration, and eXperiences that leverage avatars and simulations into a very natural style of learning by doing.

If you find yourself wishing you could get more out of your e-learning efforts, there are a lot of alternatives to consider. x-Learning, as we've designed it, simply mimics the way we choose to learn, on our own, everyday. It's high impact, but it doesn't have to be high budget.

You can read more about x-learning in other recent posts here. And certainly, if you have any questions, you can always post them on this blog. You can also give us a call or send a quick email. We love to talk about declaring war on ineffective e-learning!

Seems to me that faster and cheaper were the focus of much e-learning in 2009. But NEWS FLASH...faster and cheaper are NOT learning outcomes.

If you believe all the ads and emails, then webinars and converted PowerPoints are the pinnacle of e-learning. And I get it, there are a lot of managers out there who think the results they want are faster and cheaper. But they're taking a short-sighted approach to business outcomes, and while they may be getting communication results, they most certainly aren't getting the learning results that they're looking for.

Most communications are meant to inform employees. But it takes real learning to change behaviors and drive business results. So, in your company, are you just using up resources to inform people...or are you making the kind of investments that literally improve the organization?

Think about your own experience. Isn't this the improvement a webinar makes over instructor lead training? ...no one knows how many phone calls and emails you took care of during the presentation! And when you get online to read page by page in that converted PowerPoint, don't the drag and drop memory exercises make you feel a bit like a chimp in a learning experiment?

I thought e-learning was the next wave. I thought it was a giant improvement over classroom. If that's it, why does so much e-learning seem more like e-reading and e-listening?

In 2010, let's hold off a bit on faster and cheaper, and set our sights on BETTER. Let's take a look at how we can develop immersive simulations and game-like content that:

• Allows learners to explore well-organized content in the order and at the pace of their choosing, rather than being linear.
• Provides a chance to experience new information and concepts in a way that lets them practice, get feedback and learn in a safe environment.
• Focuses on changes in behavior and business results, rather than simply communicating.
  

Please take a look at the work on our site. If you'd like to find out more about what we might do for you, click here. 

Friday. What better day to turn your back on work and do some blogging, right? Besides, I just linked from LinkedIn to an e-learning blog post titled: Information or Knowledge...Which is it? where the author and commentors were pondering the difference between these two commodities and their meaning in e-learning.

I don't want to sound crude here, but that mentality is so 20th century...and it's so wrong. And it's wrong because business as usual isn't good enough anymore. We have to be better and smarter than that to put the American economy back on track. And for that matter, we have to continually improve what we do and how we do it...not stay stuck in what we did a decade ago.

What e-learning needs to focus on is exploration, practice, feedback...leading to competency. In other words, instructional and creative design that provides a natural way of learning by doing. And in the process e-learning changes behavior, creating new competencies that turn into company new revenues and company profits.

This selling game lets learners explore related digital home media products, then allows them to practice matching products to three different customers' needs. You can experience this game yourself at: http://bit.ly/4qeDcQ

In fact, it was years ago that we told our clients that sales training had to be more than product information. If the end result is to be more sales, then learners need to practice selling. Learners need to explore (not just read about) new products and then be able to apply what they've learned by practicing selling in a safe environment. Moreover, they must fail some of the time...because if they don't have a chance to fail and get feedback, and try again, their learning will be limited. 

If you'd like to learn more about why immersive simulations and serious games make compelling e-learning you might visit another post on this blog, Do games make compelling e-learning?: http://bit.ly/3ilXXG

That describes every popular video game on the market today. In fact, it describes every game ever made or played. And it's no accident, because it also describes life, and we design games as a reflection of how we experience life. That's why good games make for such compelling e-learning.

But as soon as I say that, it seems to me that I'm under-selling the product. I mean, game? It's not just a game. What we're talking about, really, is a mini-life experience!

More than that, we're providing the opportunity for people to experiment and make mistakes in a safe environment, so that they learn both obvious and very subtle ways to be more successful. You see? Game...just doesn't say all that!

Now...is it any wonder why people don't retain what they learn when we stand at the front of the room and talk though PowerPoint slides? Is it any wonder why reading, clicking next, and reading some more, is just short of fingernails on a blackboard, when it comes to learning? 

From day one, we've all interacted with our environment and learned...naturally, not by PowerPoint. And in a nutshell, that's why w/ continues to develop e-learning that more closely represents our natural habits of learning. Sometimes that means simple exploration, sometimes it's practicing skills within a simulation, and sometimes it means developing a game, er, I mean...mini-life experience. So, how do we go about that?

Well, to start, it's important to throw out two elements of the popular learning paradigm: pages and linearity. Throw them out. We can always go back and get them if we find they fit somewhere, but they're not a natural construct for learning. Certainly they offer a very incomplete construct for learning, do they? And while we're at it, throw out games like Concentration and Jeopardy, when used to simply develop a rote memorization of facts. Popular game shows aren't necessarily good models for e-learning.

Now, let's lay down some pretty obvious and sound guidelines: In general, learning is most successful when it's:

• Fun, challenging but not stressful, and relevant to other things that are important in our lives
• Purposeful (interpret this to mean driven by specific business expectations or desired outcomes
• Reflective of the skills we how we behave in real life, which includes having rules and being able to experiment, practice and make mistakes

There are a couple of other things that make learning more like real life: interacting within a group and being on the go. The first leads us to avatars, and social tools (blogs, wikis, online collaboration) while the second speaks to mobile learning. To be sure, there barriers to adoption for these tools, but because they imitate real life, they're destined to become part of real e-learning.

So what's the wrap-up here? The short answer is that your e-learning probably isn't compelling; probably has less impact than you want. But the great thing about that is, you don't have to be stuck there. You can start re-making your e-learning in a way that mimics life. Not linear, but exploratory...not reading, but practicing...not in isolation, but as part of a group.

After just a day of DevLearn 09, I've come away with some awesome new knowledge, contacts and ideas. But I've also developed an irritation. An irritation connected to some peoples' over-exuberance with what they call 3D learning.

There are a number of 3D solutions out there with little people running around little offices, conference rooms and events. And like all tools, I've seen them used effectively...and effectively misused. Sometimes all they amount to is 3D wrapping paper around simple, expository content.

At that point, the best you can say is the process is more exploratory and the user has more control. But you could also say that the 3D environment is so contrived that it's a distraction to learning.

Designers should always ask themselves what delivery method best contributes to their objective, which is different that starting out by saying, "Wouldn't it be cool if...?" For me, if you're going to incorporate 3D into your solution, you'd also better include one or more of the following:

• Appropriate practice of the skills it takes to succeed
• Game play, rules, consequences...whatever it takes make it really immersive
• Avatars that are real enough to truly humanize the learning experience

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.

A lot of e-learning comes down to e-telling, regardless of how engaging it might be. That's because we don't often give learners a chance to practice what they are learning. By practice, I mean: Try...fail. Try again...fail better.

The center point of simulations is practice, and so when you begin to do instructional design for simulations, you will likely have to break out of your normal box, in order to be successful. You will also find, at least at first, that you end up doing a lot more work than than you normally might.

Practice in simulations will always be more work than less immersive simulations...so you need to become efficient at it.

Practice means providing the learner options that force them to make decisions. Not easy black and white decisions...if learners don't have much chance to fail, they don't have much chance to learn, either. The matrix of options and varying paths that different decisions create, plus accompanying remediation or coaching...well, all of that takes time.

If you are clear, structured and organized in your design approach you will save yourself a lot of time and confusion. You will also deliver these same benefits to your clients and SMEs.

The diagram below presents the kind of organization that you may find useful. In this case, it relates to a retail selling scenario, but the same kind of logic should apply to pretty much any soft skills process, such as leadership or coaching.

The key concept here is to identify common elements that consistently come into play and learn what you have to know from an SME before you can complete your design. 

A selling scenario deals with human interaction, and matching a product with the customer's needs. So naturally you have to know the different options for customer types and preferences and how that relates to the products and selling approaches.

You are basically creating characters and a play, where you write the dialog that both the sales person, and the customer (and maybe a coach) will act out.

It's easy to get your SMEs roped into the instructional design process (confusing them and wasting their time) unless you are clear about these kind of parameters. So, your goal is to use your understanding of these common elements and how they shape the process...in order to simply get the right information from the SME. Then you can begin the work of writing your play.

I'm saying this last, but the place you want to start is: what decisions and behaviors will it be valuable for the learner to practice? 

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.