One of the most common struggles we hear from eLearning designers and developers is the “inability” to accurately replicate real world activities in an online format.
Now, we’re HUGE fans of eLearning, but we’re realists too. That being said, there isn’t one single solution that fits every need. As such, there are some things that eLearning just isn’t as good at compared to ILT or other formats.
There is an art to designing quality eLearning activities that approximate the key aptitudes in a given real world activity. Sometimes it takes stepping back and identifying which part of an activity is the functional skill. Then you distill that down into something that can be conveyed and interacted with through a screen.
Let’s take a look at a few examples that show how they take actual activities and present them in meaningful eLearning activities in Articulate Storyline.
Brainstorming/Group Participation
One area where people always struggle is simulating anything that is supposed to be a group activity.
While you obviously can’t replicate the exact experience of this in an asynchronous eLearning course, think about the parts of the activity you’re trying to teach/test/replicate. For example, if it is the back and forth of people in the group talking and sharing ideas, creative script writing can portray this quite well with various voices playing the parts of the conversation.
You can create a dynamic that puts the learner in the middle of a conversation around them. Do you want them to feel part of the conversation and contribute some ideas to the mix? A standard text entry field with a type and compare activity can put learners in the middle of this session, contributing their own ideas.
You can even add some game-like elements to the brainstorming by adding elements like a timer to the activity. For example, you could tell the learner than they are part of a small group, and each member will be given 60 seconds to come up with as many answers to a particular question as possible.
After the exercise, you all will share answers. With a simple text entry field and a custom timer built in Storyline, you can create this exercise. After the time expires, have the narrator pull all the examples from the learner and the fictitious other participants and display them all on the screen for a group debrief.
Paper and Pen Activities
Until touchscreen delivery improves, tools like Storyline will not be able to do very sophisticated hand writing inputs. However, there are still ways to get at the heart of some activities in Articulate Storyline like this with a little creativity.
Take the following exercise for example. This is a group exercise where participants each construct their own version of a statement, and the follow up task is to identify any duplications across versions. Using draggable objects in Storyline, you can replicate the user dragging a pen to “circle” these like items in each statement. This works because the “skill” in this step is identifying the duplicates, and this dragging activity puts learners in a situation that replicates this activity closely.
Physical Inspection Activities
This last example actually came from one of our clients, KONE, Inc. Recently we conducted a custom Storyline training session, and each session had a mini-project that we created for the learners to complete. The basic premise was to use a draggable magnifying glass to conduct a physical inspection of something, and then evaluate whether specific criteria were identified.
The example we gave them was inspecting a ladder and then completing a checklist inspection form. They took these concepts and created a work-relevant example where the learner inspected an escalator layout drawing in order to identify a specific dimension on the diagram.
In their below example, the learner drags the magnifying glass over the layout diagram to see zoomed in segments. They need to use their knowledge of escalators to identify the specific dimension requested. Once identified, the following slide asks them to enter that measurement into the appropriate field on one of the company’s survey forms.
Lesser designers would have asked this using a basic multiple-choice question, or something similarly NOT representative of the skills needed for the task. Instead, they took a real world task, identified the two main skill points (identifying the correct dimension on the layout diagram and knowing where to input that value on the survey form), and very closely replicated this in an eLearning format.
Real World Activities in Articulate Storyline: Very Possible
Obviously tasks that require training on certain physical dexterities or other non-reproducible components can be taught better in other modalities. However, it just takes some creative thinking, a little ingenuity, and a pinch of Storyline magic. You can create engaging activities that represent a lot more situations than you probably thought you could.