Branching scenarios can be a great solution for giving people an opportunity to practice making relevant decisions. While they can be a valuable experience for learners, building branching scenarios can be time-consuming and challenging. If the first decision point has three choices, and those three each have three choices, and then those three have three choices, suddenly you have 40 slides after only three decisions for the learner. The complexity of that structure grows exponentially and can be hard to manage as an instructional designer. Additionally, SMEs who are accustomed to working on traditional eLearning may be uncomfortable with branching, and you may be unsure how to get good stories and examples from them. It's easy to feel overwhelmed in the process of planning and designing branching scenarios. What you need is a better process for creating branching scenarios.
In this session, you'll learn how to streamline your processes for branching scenarios, from initial planning through writing and creating a functional prototype. You'll start from the beginning, by analyzing the problem you're trying to solve and identifying your objectives. You'll learn what questions to ask SMEs and other sources to get stories and examples to incorporate in your branching scenario. You'll also discover tactics for eliciting responses from SMEs if you're "stuck." You'll get tips for planning the flow of your scenario, including comparing different branching structures of varied complexity. You'll then see how the free, open-source tool Twine can streamline the process of planning, writing, and prototyping branching scenarios. You'll learn the advantages of writing one complete path in the branching scenario from start to finish before fleshing out the alternative paths, and find out how to give learners opportunities to correct their mistakes in ways that both deepen learning and simplify your design. By the end of this session, you'll have a streamlined process for planning, designing, writing, and prototyping branching scenarios that can then be built in any authoring tool you want.
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