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? 

Corporate purchasing agents have to be good at investigating, and evaluating...and sometimes...good at beating people up, in order to get the best product or service at the lowest price. It's a tough job that I certainly wouldn't want.

At w/, we make it easier to buy from us by being an immersive botique.

We're immersive not just because we do immersive elearning, but because we truly immerse ourselves in our clients business and objectives.  And we're a botique because we're big enough to take on anything that our much larger competitors can, but small enough to care personally, about every project we do.

When we're scrutinized as being too small, I point out our global and Fortune 100 clients. But more importantly, I point out that, while a large company may have more employees, for the money a project costs, you won't get any more people working on it than you do at w/. And with a bigger company, it's likely that these people have never even met you...so how can they truly understand your needs, your business?

There are times when bigger is better, sure. But when it comes to high-quality, high-value elearning, an immersive botique, like w/, just might be the way to go. Just ask our clients!

In the most current issue of the Harvard Business Review, I learned that neuroscientists have discovered that social interactions literally effect our brain chemistry. Not such a surprise, really since our interactions create emotional responses and, in the brain and body, different emotions are associated with different chemicals.

The article features Daniel Goldman, who launched the concept of emotional intelligence in leadership a decade ago, and contends:

“Leading effectively is, in other words, less about mastering situations — or even mastering social skill sets — than about developing a genuine interest in and talent for fostering positive feelings in the people whose cooperation and support you need.”

1. We need to stay attuned to the personal needs of our learners (delivering solutions that meet these needs).
2. We need to understand how elearning fits within the social system of our learners (the entire picture of their work and time needs and demands).
3. We need to be part of the mentoring and coaching that every employee benefits from (making it obvious that there is more value to our programs than just shoving new information at our learners).

Will that change the brain chemistry of our learners? Apparently. But whether you believe that or not, you can be certain it will help build better relationships with their learners. And relationships with employees, sales channels and customers that gain more trust and commitment are always incredibly valuable when it comes to building brand and achieving business objectives.

It's nice to have the scientific foundation for these ideas, but these have always been the principles embedded in our work here at w/. That's why, when we say "w/" what we mean is: "We're w/ you."

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.