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.

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.

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.