701 Go Beyond Boring: Creating Scenario-Based Learning that Engages Participants

11:30 AM - 12:30 PM Thursday, February 20

Workplace training can be dry and boring, leaving participants disengaged. If participants can’t immediately see the connection between their training and their jobs, they won’t be motivated to complete training or to apply new skills to their jobs. As well, eLearning can at times be too focused on just remembering content and not give people opportunities to practice their new skills. It also can emphasize behavioral engagement (clicking), at the expense of affective engagement (emotions and values) or cognitive engagement (effort and deep learning strategies).

In this session you'll learn how scenarios can make your eLearning more interesting and relevant to your audience. Scenario-based learning can affect emotions to make participants care about the content and keep them engaged. You can use scenarios to hook people and draw them into the story right from the start. You can also use them to practice relevant decision-making skills in situations similar to real life. You'll explore branching scenarios—a common scenario strategy—as well as a range of other options for incorporating storytelling and scenarios in eLearning, many of which can be used with a variety of development tools.

In this session, you will learn:

  • Why scenario-based learning works
  • About the range of options for using scenarios in learning
  • How to use scenarios to hook participants into eLearning
  • How to design scenarios to increase emotional engagement
  • How to create scenarios to practice relevant decision-making

Christy Tucker

Learning Experience Design Consultant

Syniad Learning

Christy Tucker is a learning experience design consultant with over 20 years of experience helping people learn. She specializes in using scenario-based learning to engage audiences and promote skill transfer to real-world environments. She has created training for a wide range of clients, including Fortune 500 companies, nonprofit associations, state and local government agencies, universities, and more. Christy has been blogging about instructional design and eLearning for over 15 years and is a regular speaker at industry conferences and events.

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