At thispoint in our process, the design team had resolved the fundamental issues:objective, scenarios, how to engage the learners, meaningful activity, anddetermining the pedagogy. Now, we had to consider some key choices and discernwhether our initial ideas were due to personal taste, or untested assumptions,or what was best for the learners.
Tone
Getting theright “tone” in the experience is challenging. Ideally, you have to make surethat the right path to take is not obvious. Too often, questions are easy toget right, but you really want to have a reasonable amount of challenge to rampup both the engagement and the learning outcome. We worked to make sure thatwas the case as we started looking at the scenarios, though we may haveneglected that initially.
Learnnovators: We also added intrinsicfeedback at the end of the scenarios; though this (intrinsic feedback) is builtinto the natural design of a scenario through dialogue, we wanted to “show” theconsequences of learners’ decisions once they had reached an endpoint. This webuilt in through a simple description of what happened in the organization afew weeks or months after they reached the end, followed by an explanation of whythis happened.
Artand illustration
Similarly, theLearnnovators commissioned an artist to create the characters in the scenarios.They chose one I didn’t know, but liked the look of. The illustrations weresomewhat cartoonish and graphic-novel-ish, which I liked (we don’t use suchformats nearly often enough in eLearning). For the second scenario, I suggesteddoing them differently, maybe making them different colors. They made onegreen, and that led to a thought of perhaps deliberately throwing in somedifferent novelty in each of the scenarios.
Audiouse
Asmentioned in my previous article, we were postponing audio, if using it at all, but thenthe idea came up to use it just for stage setting and cues of outcomes. Despitemy initial negative reaction (and probably an implicit bias), we considered itand again decided to try it out. The point is to not answer on the basis ofpersonal viewpoints, but either search for evidence or trial it. Oncedetermined, then it can be persistent throughout.
Scenariocontent
Our work onscenarios and content continued. Typically, they’d generate a context andinitial scenario, which I’d fine-tune. Sometimes I’d want the scenario to bemore focused on a particular aspect of the learning (serving as a subjectmatter expert at times), as we’d get somewhat far afield. Other times, it wouldbe to rein in the dialogue. While you want to experiment and get out there, asyour learners will thank you, it requires a fine touch to sound naturalistic.
Learnnovators: Randomizing choicesis a great idea in any quiz, especially so in a branching scenario. So this wassomething Clark flagged for us early on in the design stage, and we achieved itduring development.
Gender
One of theissues that came up was gender. I’ve been keen to use gender-neutral prose asmuch as possible ever since I read an article about how to do so (with animplicit “why it’s important”). I use gender-neutral names as much as possibleand try to avoid the “he/she”—or, worse, the “s/he”—if I can write it insteadin a gender-neutral way. And, of course, we were rendering the characters, soeventually they would have to be depicted as one gender or another. Still, onprinciple, I fought for making sure the text was gender-neutral, even the dialogue.This was met with general agreement, but the difficulty was somewhatchallenging and there was pushback.
Assumptionsabout the learners
Anotherpersonal irritation is not assuming intelligence on the part of your learners. Ihave a real problem with a label that says, “Click the Next button to continue.”Maybe, maybe, in the early days, butnowadays it’s pretty hard to make the case. First, pretty much everyone has nowhad some eLearning experience(probably bad). Second, there is considerable experience with interfacestandards in general. And I think it’s an insult to learners’ intelligence totell them how to use an interface. There may be instances when it’s appropriate,but in general I don’t like it. Fortunately, there was no argument with thispoint either.
Learnnovators: This was something wegenerally agreed with. But while the Next button was obvious and widelyunderstood by learners, it may not be so with other buttons. For suchinteractions, we decided to provide a subtle visual clue about the “clickability”of the buttons, such as flashing the buttons a few times to indicate they areclickable.
