It's easy for our jobs to get in the way of what we do. There's so much work to be cranked out! But as always, work should be about quality, not just quantity...and ultimately it has to be about results. We can't afford to put as much time and money into e-learning as we do, if we don't get a good return on our investment.

ROI is the WHY behind strategy. So your first checkpoint on effective e-learning is: are your courses supporting a well articulated strategy? Unfortunately the usual answer is, at best, only a partial "yes".

Check your own experience: is 90% or more of your sales training just product information? Or is it focused on how to sell the right product to the right cusotmer? Too many times, that's not the case. And while sales training is an easy example, we could be talking about any course that's fat on what and lean on how, why and practice.

This post would be way too long if I were going to cover HOW to incorporate strategy. It's more about WHAT you can be doing strategically, to improve both quality and ROI. But I promise, week-after-week in the coming months we will be talking a lot about the HOW-TO of integrating strategy into your courses.

Let's return specifically to sales training as our example for implementing e-learning strategy, allow me to introduce these additional questions:

• Do you understand your customer's point of view and are you training from that direction?
• Are you reusing e-learning content to help customers sell themselves?
• Is part of your effort working to create word of mouth (WOM) in the marketplace?
• And finally, does your e-learning support brand preference that leads to repurchasing?

If it never occurred to you that these strategies should be driving your e-learning efforts, that's okay. But when you're measured on the results of your program, as more and more of us are, this might be just the improvement you've been looking for. See you next week!

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.  

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? 

Everyone pretty much agrees that immersive elearning is better than simpler, linear, click-ahead elearning. Or maybe not.

We've sometimes experienced unexpected client angst when developing more immersive courses. Discomfort that immersive production takes longer. Concern that an immersive approach makes for longer learner seat time. Confusion that not every option in a simulation is black and white.

So maybe we should address the shifting paradigms that must accompany successful immersive elearning. Five immediately come to mind:

1. The point of immersive elearning is to slow the learner down, so that the learning sticks. Evaluating, studying, practicing...all take more time than skimming content just to get to the assessment. But while immersed, longer times actually seem like shorter times.
2. Immersive development time is greater than the time it takes to create click-ahead content. More time for the client, the SME, the instructional designer, and the developer. Create structure and processes that keep you focused and working more efficiently.
3. Instructional design for immersive elearning is more than linear content dressed up with avatars and games. You will have to fight to reorganize the way you think, to do this right. It requires more insight, and more levels subtlety to create a successful learner experience.
4. We learn best by doing. When you get right down to it, we learn by failing. If you are not providing the learner with practice at making decisions, and failing, you are missing out on a powerful tool.
5. When using avatars (and you should use avatars) don't use them simply as eye candy. Use them to create a social interaction, which will be engaging as it builds trust in your training brand. Use them, as with a valuable mentor or coach, to build better relationships with your learners.