If the sticker on the box says the product is, “Engaging,” is it?
The word “engaging” is probably the most overused word in the ever-evolving world of e-Learning. Vendors like to say that their courseware is “engaging.” But is clicking on a button labeled “Next” after reading through an onscreen passage engaging? Is answering a simple multiple-choice quiz engaging? What about listening to a narrator read words on a screen? Is that engaging? Do any of these things capture the attention of our audience and sustain it? Do the typical interactions found in most e-Learning courses pull learners into an experience and entertain them? In most cases, do our learners even remember the experience after they’ve clicked the “Exit” button? Sadly, many probably don’t.
Of course, no one ever sets out to create a “bad” course. But, faced with corporate constraints of time, budget, and the occasional pesky manager, we often fall into our comfort zone — and create what we know will get the project off our plates. That usually means creating a course that follows the traditional, linear instructional model of telling and then testing.
This is too bad, because there’s another model out there that truly is engaging. It’s a model that immerses its participants into experiences that demand purposeful interactions. It’s a model that gives participants concrete, real-world goals to strive towards. And it’s a model that its participants willingly embrace. So much so that many of them will wait in long lines at big electronic gadget stores and pay serious money to embrace it.
Of course the model I’m referring to here is the modern video game model. So, are your eyes rolling yet? I hope not, but some people seem to hold the belief that learning can’t take place if fun and games are involved.
I’m one who happens to disagree with that position. This isn’t to say that I think our learners should be shooting aliens while learning about Sexual Harassment or chasing cute, multicolored ghosts while learning about something like Workplace Violence. “Fun” in my mind doesn’t mean cute characters or abstract animations. Fun, to me, is the absence of boredom. Adopting a modern video-game model does not mean alienating learners who are turned off by games. It means adopting a model that incorporates some of the most compelling elements of today’s immersive, simulation-based video game experiences.
Playing the policy game
In a lot of today’s video games, players do battle with ogres, or aliens or other incarnations of evil. Well, the incarnation of evil that we had to deal with at Allstate was something much worse. It was the dreaded Human Resource Policy Guide!
Our team needed to develop a curriculum of required courses based on these infamous, yet vitally important, HR policies. The courses in the curriculum (eventually called the Allstate Policy and Compliance Curriculum or APCC) include: Information Technology Usage, Ethics and Integrity, Sexual Harassment/Non- Discrimination, and Workplace Violence.
To create the APCC, our team
designed and implemented a courseware approach we dubbed “Digital Experiential Learning”
or
During this article, I’ll use the
“F” word a few more times, while explaining the approach we took at Allstate to
deliver online human resource policy training. I’ll get into the instructional
elements we used to help enable retention, the gaming elements we used to
sustain motivation, and the simple in-house technology we used to build these
courses. I’ll also talk about the reactions our audience had to the
Why the new approach?
There were four facts driving the development of this curriculum. The first fact has to do with the way the policies are written. They’re written in the preferred language of most policy documents — “legalese.” And for those of you who can read legalese — congratulations! But for the rest of us, me included, legalese is more difficult to wade through than a passage from a high school Latin book. So the courses needed to be easy to understand. The second and most important reason we were looking for a new approach to delivering this content was that we wanted to be sure employees “got it.” This was especially important in light of the fact that they could be terminated if they didn’t “get it.” The third driver in our overall development was we wanted to be sure that our audience retained what they learned.
But there was also a fourth fact, and it had to do with motivation. If someone tunes out of our course after the first few screens because they’re bored, then nothing else really matters. We’ve lost them. We often assume that adult learners can find a way to “self-motivate” when they feel that the content benefits them in some direct way. But in this situation, the content really tested that assumption. In our opinion, traditional e-Learning wasn’t going to cut it. We needed something more.
We needed something “engaging.” More importantly, we needed an approach that kept learners motivated while also enabling content retention. We needed something that was FUN. But it also needed to be something that would be taken seriously, as the subject matter demanded. It needed to be an approach that was grounded in the real world, not just a video-game fantasy.
The recommended approach, and the one
agreed to by our internal clients, was the proposed “Digital Experiential Learning”
approach. I’ll describe some of the key elements of the
