e-Learning Leadership Blog

posted by Judy Unrein on June 11, 2009 
SAW THE DIFFERENCE DEMONSTRATED THIS WEEK 
I saw an interesting demonstration of the difference between games and gaming at my ASTD chapter meeting this week. A local company had created a suite of learning games to increase their employees' engagement in the company's overall strategy. The majority of the games rewarded knowledge of the material but also skill at the game itself, such as pressing buttons quickly. One of them, though, was a branching scenario as Steve described. 
 
While the company may or may not have consciously intended the scenario game to have a different purpose than the others, the presenters did remark that this "game" seemed more difficult for their learners. It wasn't hard to see why; while they had made it very engaging and created a good storyline, the scenario game clearly tested a whole different level of knowledge and skills. 
 
Interestingly, the company could not comment on the effectiveness of this game vs. the others, as "learning" didn't seem to be the primary objective of the project; the main metric by which the initiative was judged was involvement (the equivalent of attendance, I suppose, for instructor-led training). 
 
I guess I sneered at that objective a bit for a while (internally), but after some reflection I have to say I'm proud of the design team for including this level of interaction when they clearly didn't have to. Good scenarios don't have to be boring or difficult -- in fact I would say that good scenarios are NOT, by definition, boring -- but they certainly ask more of the learner and require more instructional design effort than button-pressing games. The design team chose to take that effort, and ask more from the learner (which is not always easy to do), in order to give the learner more than a high score on a leaderboard at the end.

posted by Steve Lee, June 19, 2009 
HIGHER LEVEL OF LEARNING 
It is very true that a robust learning environment that is scenario driven and provides an authentic representation of the actual "job to be performed" will always be harder for students than a more presentational or even game like objective based testing engine. The designers must be carefule to either build an intuitive user interface or build a good tutorial to the learning environment so the challenge for the student is focussed on "what decisions/choices to make" and not "how to make them". Good learning is often difficult, especially when the job is difficult. The difficulty of good learning should be equivilant to a good "one on one" mentor/apprentice modeling exercise, effective role playing, etc. with an instructor that expects the most from their students.