Welcome to my inaugural monthly column for Learning Solutions Magazine! It’s an honor to be counted among my prestigious peers each month. My focus will be on the tools of our trade, hence the title of my column: “Toolkit.” Over the past year, Learning Solutions Magazine has published several articles of mine covering tools. Those were in-depth reviews. This column instead will be short and sweet, getting right to the point.
Each month, I will cover a tool that I believe will have an effect on our industry, usually for the better. Some of these tools will be brand new, or at least new to you. Other columns will review substantial updates to tools that have been around for a while. Know of a tool that you want me to cover? Write me at captivatejoe@joeganci.com.
This Month’s Tool: Hand Multimedia’s Roleplay
Let me introduce you to a tool that is not yet well known: Roleplay by Hand Multimedia, whose headquarters are in Christchurch, New Zealand. With aptly named Roleplay, you can quickly and easily create online, sophisticated, decision-driven scenarios. At last year’s eLearning Guild DevLearn conference, Hand Multimedia walked away with the prestigious Brandon Hall Bronze for Best Innovation in Learning Technology while the product was still in Beta.
Figure 1 shows a typical case scenario.
Figure 1. A learner scenario built with Roleplay
Hand Multimedia designed Roleplay as an enterprise product, and it has quickly started taking hold in New Zealand. They signed on the biggest players in the Australasian market, from sectors including health, banking, telecommunications, retail, insurance, and aviation in a paid pilot program. These companies have gone on to purchase Roleplay as an integral part of their eLearning toolkit.
Who is the typical developer for this tool? Roleplay is aimed directly at instructional designers and trainers. It does not require scripting or programming. Its interface, like any other, takes a little time to learn, but it is clearly laid out and quite intuitive.
Developing in Roleplay
The Roleplay development environment is completely Web-based. This means you can have multiple developers working on a course without the need to exchange files. The administrator can set access levels and track each developer’s time.
Each scene in a scenario is represented as a numbered circle. You can string scenes together easily and each scene may have multiple outcomes, each of which may navigate to another scene. Figure 2 shows the development environment.
Figure 2: The Roleplay Designer environment
Green circles represent start scenes and all gray circles represent interim, or transition, scenes. Those scenes that represent a good outcome for the learner are blue and those that represent a bad outcome are red.
Note the tabs at the bottom of the environment. These lead to all of the various features and options available to you to build scenarios.
The advanced branching is one aspect that really sets Roleplay apart from other tools. For example, you can set up branching based on probabilities or learners’ previous decisions. You can set up branching in seconds without coding.
Roleplay can publish to several different venues, including mobile devices. It is also SCORM, AICC, and Adobe Connect compliant. In addition, you can swap out navigation and language skins.
One cool feature is that you can choose who your audience is at any time and Roleplay automatically adjusts the output for that audience or purpose. For instance, you can develop one scenario and use it for pre- and post-assessment, as a pilot for trainees, or for trainers and facilitators. In facilitation mode, for example, Roleplay works with audience response hardware and graphs the results in real time. In pilot mode, it provides an easy way to pass feedback directly to the designer through use of a feedback button on the screen.
Limitations
As with any tool, you need to be aware of Roleplay’s limitations, as well as its capabilities.
- Roleplay focuses on scenario-based learning, so it won’t replace a more general-purpose eLearning authoring tool.
- As this is version 1.0, Roleplay currently offers several screen layouts based on best practices. You will probably find them perfectly suitable to your needs, but realize that you won’t have a lot of flexibility in moving elements around the screen.
- Roleplay is a Web-based authoring environment. As such, Hand Multimedia has taken great pains to make it feel as fast as a desktop application and I believe it has succeeded, as long as you are not working on very slow connections. However, like any Software as a Service (SaaS) application, some organizations may have firewalls that prevent access.
Conclusion
Roleplay is clearly a tool built around business and training needs rather than around technical developers’ needs. There is a strong need to deliver less linear learning and more case-based decision-driven scenarios. The former may work for imparting information, though not always very well. The latter actually improves productivity and the bottom line. The cost of creating scenarios that are driven by learners need not be that much higher than more traditional eLearning, but they can deliver much higher results and retention. Roleplay may well play a big part in delivering these types of scenarios in a way that does not require programming knowledge.
