LEARNING DESIGNERS! BORING BULLETS ARE NOT YOUR WORST ENEMY!

Congratulations! You can now play games at work!

This was the underlying theme of a compliance course that I recently had the opportunity to review. Designed as a highly engaging game, the course set you off on a hunt for clues to find an elusive parrot, traveling to various cities and learning about compliance along the way. As you unearthed a clue, a slice of compliance information got revealed, followed by a short quiz on the information. Your performance in the quiz earned you gadgets that helped you in your search for more clues.

As a game, the piece struck all the right notes. I got involved right from the word ‘go’. I wanted to find more clues. I wanted to collect more gadgets. I wanted to win.

BUT WHAT ABOUT LEARNING?

Throughout the experience, I kept thinking “but what about learning?” Because nowhere on my quest did I ever get to think about compliance. My main focus in answering the quiz questions was to earn gadgets on the way to unearthing my next clue. This was probably because the core content was still presented as just that – content. The quiz was tarted up to be engaging, as a means to an end, and not an end in itself.

And, though the course told me at the beginning that “finding more clues will give you access to more compliance information”, I kept asking “why?”. Nowhere during the experience could I connect with why the compliance information was important to me, or how it was going to help me do my job better. Neither the content nor the quiz questions had anything to do with application. Written in typical legal-speak, the content portion of the course explained the ‘what’, while entirely missing the ‘why’ and the ‘how’.

LIPSTICK ON A PIG

Now, this is typically what Cathy Moore calls “putting lipstick on a pig”. If a course is not intrinsically interesting, then adding bells and whistles in the form of games and adventures can only serve to improve its cosmetic value. The core content remains in the same state – boring and ineffective.

I can understand why this happens. The word ‘compliance’ can conjure up images of boring, banal courses that spew out bullet point after bullet point of lackluster content. And, it’s exciting to think about making the course game-like, to add colors and audio and video, and challenges and what not, just to make it more ‘engaging’.

CLICKY-CLICKY BLING-BLING

Cammy Bean refers to this as “clicky-clicky bling-bling” – a course that ranks high on the ‘bling’ thing, but fails to address its basic mandate of learning and performance improvement.

Bling is not a bad thing, per se. It’s like great packaging. Who isn’t attracted to products that are packaged well? But when applied to a bad product (one that doesn’t work as intended), it becomes “clicky-clicky bling-bling”.

STRATEGIES TO AVOID CLICKY-CLICKY BLING-BLING

What can we do to steer clear of “clicky-clicky bling-bling”, and make sure the course addresses the primary need it was commissioned to address? Here are some strategies we can follow:

1. Start by defining the goal, or the ‘What’s In It For Me’ (WIIFM) for the business. This is what will help us justify why the course needs to exist in the first place, and align the course design with what the business needs.

2. In addition to the ‘what’, make sure to amply address the ‘why’ and the ‘how’ for learners. This will help them understand that the game (or concept) exists to support the course, and not the other way around.

3. Put the learners in a context that closely mirrors real life, and have them make the decisions that they would have to make in real life.

4. Make each of the choices (the decisions that they would have to make in the scenario / context above) plausible, ensuring that they think before making a choice.

5. Let the scenarios and choices challenge learners the right way. Have them think hard about the situation and the consequences that they would have to face as a result of their decisions, not about the sentence construct and what it might mean before making a choice. Which leads me to my next point…

6. Write the content, and the quiz, in plain English. For example:

“When you see a violation, please report using the third-party hotline. You can do so confidentially and anonymously, which means you don’t have to fear retaliation.”

…is a lot simpler and sounds way better than:

“No employee will be retaliated against for reporting any known or suspected compliance violation. The organization makes reporting violations easy by utilizing an unbiased third-party vendor who receives Hotline calls. These calls are taken both confidentially and anonymously.”

7. Allow people a way out. I can’t overstate the importance of this. As learning designers, we might find a game or a concept very interesting, but it’s possible that learners consider it a dud. Don’t make them suffer through it. Allow them to take a well-designed assessment, and if they want to review information, let them go through a PDF with all the content. Because at the end of the day, what matters is that they learn and can perform better, not whether they win the game.

What other strategies can you think of to make a course effective as well as engaging?

Written by Srividya Kumar

(Co-Founder at Learnnovators)

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Published on 08-Dec-2016