How to Build Powerful eLearning Scenarios
Powerful eLearning Scenarios (3 Tips for Instructional Designers)
How can you make powerful eLearning scenarios that are memorable AND have a business impact?
If you’re an eLearning developer or instructional designer, you need to know what methods to use so you can be most effective. You need to go beyond ADDIE and traditional eLearning methods if you want to create powerful scenarios.
In this post, I’ll reveal three tips that will help you create powerful elearning scenarios. And at the end I’ll include a bonus tip that will save you a ton of time on your projects.
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Tip 1: Use Action Mapping for eLearning Scenarios
Action mapping is a methodology developed by Cathy Moore. I think of it as a new instructional design technique for achieving real business impact in the workplace.
With action mapping, you don’t do traditional needs analysis. Instead, you interview your SMEs or subject matter experts to identify the business goal they want to achieve. You find out what ACTIONS people need to DO to achieve that goal, and why they aren’t doing it.
Notice it’s about what people need to DO, not what they need to KNOW. This helps you avoid creating eLearning that is essentially an information dump.
What are the Benefits of Action Mapping?
You also discover the real causes of the problems - whether they're caused by the workplace environment, a knowledge gap, a skills gap, or a motivation problem. Then you design a solution that’s laser focused on activities that move the business forward.
This approach can really transform your career: when you use action mapping, you’re less like an order taker, and more like a performance consultant.
Transform Your Instructional Design Career
Action mapping has taken the L&D industry by storm. There are so many thought leaders out there right now talking about Action Mapping. And I know it’s completely transformed the way I work on my client projects.
Cathy Moore explains how to use action mapping in her excellent book, Map It. If you haven’t seen it yet, I highly recommend reading this book. If you happen to be new to instructional design, this book will help you avoid common mistakes. And if you’re an experienced instructional designer, you’ll discover new ways to have a greater impact.
To learn more, check out the book Map It by Cathy Moore
Tip # 2: Use Storytelling for eLearning Scenarios
Think back to those word problems you encountered during high school math class. Do you even remember what they were about? Do you recall who the characters were or what happened to them? Did those word problems engage your emotions in any way?
Now compare THAT experience to how you think of your favorite movie or story.
There’s a reason you remember stories, and it has to do with a common story structure called the hero’s journey.
The Benefits of Digital Storytelling
The hero’s journey shows up frequently in books, movies, and popular shows. I’ll go into more details in a future video, but for now, think of it as the protagonist’s journey from an ordinary life to a happy ending, as they grow through challenges they face along the way.
For instance, say you’re asked to create a series of call center training questions. You need to describe a customer problem, and then present several choices for the call service agent’s response.
Instead of just presenting each question as a separate word problem, try surrounding them with a story narrative. You could introduce the agent as the protagonist, then give her a little bit of backstory, so that we sympathize with her and care about her as the hero.
Call Center Training - eLearning Scenario Example
Then when the Call Center Service Agent is talking with each customer, it feels like her decisions matter. If she makes a mistake, and you see the bad consequence play out, it draws you deeper into the story. It awakens our feelings of empathy, and that’s what keeps us engaged.
Maybe she can revisit those decisions and learn from her mistakes. As she makes better choices, we watch the good consequences play out, and we cheer her on. And when she finally makes it to that happy ending, we feel happy for her.
Plus we’ve learned alongside her during her hero’s journey. We’re more likely to remember what we’ve learned if we felt emotionally engaged when we learned it.
That’s the power of storytelling. It makes learning stick because it awakens empathy inside the human heart, and boosts audience engagement to the next level.
Tip #3: Use Action Mapping and Storytelling TOGETHER
Both action mapping and storytelling are good instructional design tools when used independently of each other. You can use action mapping techniques without any kind of hero’s journey, and still create impactful activities.
Or you could use storytelling combined with traditional ADDIE methodology and come up with a really solid eLearning course.
But if your goal is to create the most powerful eLearning scenarios possible, it’s best to use Action Mapping and Storytelling together.
Action mapping is like the bones of your eLearning scenario.
In the human body, it’s the bones that give us structure, it’s what helps us stand upright. Without our bones, we’d all just be formless blobs.
In the same way, action mapping gives your eLearning scenarios structure. Action mapping ties the scenario directly to key business goals and activities that move the business forward.
Story is like the body that surrounds the bones.
It's the hair, eyes, body form, and facial features. It’s what people see when they see you, how they remember you, and how they interact with you.
Story is the glue that holds the eLearning scenario together. When you begin telling someone a story, they immediately drop their guard. Instead of gearing up for a big informational lecture, they relax into listening mode. And if you incorporate elements from the hero’s journey, you’ll engage their hearts as well as their minds.
Long after your eLearning scenario is over, they’ll still remember it at a deep, intuitive level because the story engaged their emotions.
Benefits of Using Action Mapping and Storytelling for eLearning Scenarios
The bottom line is this: If you build an eLearning story that doesn’t achieve ANY business goals, at best you have entertainment, and at worst you have irrelevant training.
And if your eLearning just a series of disjointed word problems, you might have just transported your audience back to their high school math class.
So use action mapping and storytelling together, to create the most powerful eLearning scenarios. The kind with high emotional engagement AND high business impact.
BONUS TIP: Use structure to manage scope
If you’ve been doing eLearning or instructional design for any amount of time, you know all about the dangers of scope creep.
Let’s say you build a branching scenario with 3 choices per decision and just 3 levels of decisions. You’d have to create 27 alternate endings, and many of those endings might never even be seen by your audience.
NOW imagine what it would be like to review this branching scenario with your SME. First you have to explain to the SME how to read and give you feedback on the branching map. And then if they make any changes, it causes a ripple effect that cascades through all the connected branches.
This kind of structure can create a scope creep nightmare that becomes a real drain on your time and productivity.
There might be a few situations that require this level of complexity, but most business problems can be solved with a much simpler structure.
If you know how to use tools like bottlenecks and variables, you can drastically decrease scope, yet still deliver a powerful learning experience.
Bottlenecks are events that draw many alternate scenes back together into one single event. For instance, by strategically adding one bottleneck event, you could reduce your number of alternate endings from 27 to 9.
Variables are another way to simplify project scope. If you’re using a tool like Articulate Storyline or Adobe Captivate, you can use variables to track decisions people make as they go through your scenario. Then at the end, you can jump to the appropriate alternate ending based on the value of those variables.
I’ll go into more detail about bottlenecks and variables in a future video, but for now, just know that it’s important to choose the right structure in order to manage project scope.
New Series: Instructional Design Tips
I’m just about to release a brand new video series called instructional design tips. This series will cover topics like the power of story, the pros and cons of branching scenarios, and how to use Articulate 360.
Subscribe to my YouTube channel to see those videos as soon as they’re uploaded.