Fairy tales do a better job of teaching kids the values of honesty and hard work than all the dressing-down you may administer or the sermons you deliver. Kids learn from examples. Adults are no different. They feel inspired by the stories of struggle, hardship, courage, and triumph of our real-life heroes and feel motivated to emulate them. Have you seen a soccer coach teaching in a classroom or someone learning to drive a car by reading how-to manuals? No. Some tasks are learned best with hands-on training. Scenario-based eLearning (SBL) courses combine the magical appeal and relevance of stories with the realism of hands-on training within a virtual environment. Virtual scenarios let learners gather professional expertise and experience within a much shorter duration than what they would have obtained from just working at their real jobs. What is more, scenario-based learning lets them learn through a trial-and-error process that is as effective as getting an on-job training but without having to face the consequences or bear the costs of a wrong decision. Scenario-based learning is well-suited to teach or help the learner hone skills that involve decision-making. Scenarios are often used to teach soft skills like communicating with customers to sell various offerings or resolve complaints. Sometimes learners need to learn, practice, and perfect skills like emergency preparedness and reaction, so they are not caught unaware when a crisis actually arises. SBL is the best instructional strategy to achieve this end. In this post we will take over a simple and proven model to guide your planning of a scenario for your eLearning course.

Creating an eLearning course is a creative process. As an instructional designer, you need to be come up with designs and ideas that wow your audience. But in trying to be innovative, we often end up creating courses that wow us but fail to inspire the audience. We feel elated at having used a novel technology but fail to impress the learners. We think we have got across a message effectively but the learners leave our course feeling unfulfilled and without solutions to their problems. There is obviously a gap somewhere! Yes, the gap is in the thinking processes. We, as instructional designers, tend to think differently than the learners. But you want to create a course that not only impresses the learners but also helps them solve their problems. You want to create a course that convinces the learners to change their thoughts and behavioral patterns. You want to create a course that is memorable and enlightening. To create a course that sticks and connects with your audience, you have to step into their shoes, delve into their minds, and deliver what they need.

It is true that we learn design principles from a bunch of theories. But too often, we eLearning designers make the mistake of relying on these theories to give us design ideas. They can provide ideas but only so much. You need to think beyond the theories and look around you to find inspiration and break free from the creativity rut. Last week we published the first part of the Creativity Series. Here we will continue giving you more design hacks.

How often have you spent hours staring at a blank screen in front of you trying to come up with an innovative eLearning design? Waiting for inspiration to strike is agonizing, and if ideas take too long to show up, you begin to wonder if your creative juices have dried up. Scary, isn't it? Admit it; we don't get to enjoy too much variety in the content for the courses we create. HR policies, health and safety guidelines, sales techniques, team management and leadership roles, and application and systems training—we seem to circle round and round these types of content, often for years. Our learners often belong to the same demographic group, which means they tend to have similar learning styles and preferences. It is not surprising that most of the time we fall back on tried-and-tested design strategies, either because we fear experimenting or we run short of ideas. We end up falling into a design rut. Beware! Do not let your creative juices dry up. Follow the tips below to cultivate and nurture a creative mind that is always brimming with ideas.

I was at LinkedIn when I came across this post by Paul W., Managing Director at Wright Solutions: “People hate compliance training, they don’t remember it and they don’t take it seriously!” What do you think? I have to agree with Paul! Is this the students' fault? No! It's our fault! Most compliance eLearning courses can be sooo boring, the topics presented are just “common-sense” or too repetitive, and learners only take the course because they “have to” – not because they are expected to learn anything useful. eLearning professionals know this, but why is that we keep immersing learners in hours of regulatory torpor? Why can we develop courses that engage our audience in the same way their favorite book or TV series traps them? I think the book The Age of Slide Stuffing has the answer: “We’ve forgotten to tell stories; we’ve learnt to stuff slides”. In this age of lightning-fast communication and varied media, we are bombarded with messages from all quarters. How many of these stick with us? How many move us? You have to admit that although many messages pack in oodles of wow factor, courtesy of technology, not many inspire you. That's because they fail to connect with you emotionally. As an instructional designer, you should care. After all, you want your courses to help your audience. The solution? Weave storytelling into your compliance eLearning courses to make them resonate with your audience's hearts. Yes, stories can enrich and make memorable even dull, drab, and complex technical subject matter. Teaching through stories and metaphors is the best way to hook your time-crunched adult audience and keep them engaged till the end.

What does an instructional designer do when he or she is at work? He hobnobs with clients who may be life coaches, entrepreneurs, healthcare professionals, owners of production units, real estate magnates, or banking professionals. He gets to read on and learn about a mindboggling array of subjects—self-development tactics, new software systems, fire safety, managing diseases and medical emergencies, flying an airplane, food packaging, and everything else under the sun. He shares office with creative graphic designers and illustrators who make scenes and people come alive with their images, wordsmiths who paint pictures with their words, and maverick programmers who bring together the words and the pictures to create exciting courses. He looks for inspiration in movies, video games, books, and toys. There's never a dull moment at work for the instructional designer. And he gets paid to have the fun!

Remember the school days? They were not only about making new friends, sharing lunches, having crushes, and dreaming of making it to the basketball team. There were some trying times too. For some, the Algebra class was a nightmare while for others, History lessons brought out the tears. Yet, the demons are not inside the formulae, dates, or maps. How a subject is taught has a lot to do with how well we learn it. Not every one of us had a passion for Literature, but we all loved it when Mrs. Smith made us dress up and play the characters from the stories we had to read. Not of all of us have grown up to become chemists, but many would love to go back to Mr. Henry's laboratory to once more have fun mixing chemicals. The reason we see so many boring and passive eLearning is because it is just flat out easier for the designer. It is challenging to create learning that engages learners, that fires up their brain's synapses and makes content stick. But all you instructional designers out there, you have to take up this challenge; you owe this to your learners who have probably stayed back, rescheduled their meetings, or postponed tasks to take your course.

Recently, I attended a Congress of Human Resources. On stage, the speaker appeared charismatic, professional, and he gave quite an entertaining presentation. He held the audience's attention by constantly making jokes and adding interesting personal anecdotes. I sat through the entire speech waiting for the speaker to reach a climax, make a solid point or establish a noteworthy conclusion. In the end, I was left unsatiated, with the feeling that while the attendees had all had a good time, no real learning had actually taken place. This same situation occurs during trainings for countless companies. In-person trainings involve a fun and enjoyable classroom environment, but often lack applicable content. Similarly, online trainings are all too often attractive eLearning courses with impressive graphics and animations that still fail to teach meaningful information. We must remember that the ultimate goal of a training course is to learn. But how do we know that we have fulfilled this goal after delivering it? Here, it is important to mention one key element: evaluation. There are many different approaches to evaluating the effectiveness of an eLearning course, but they all share a common first step: identifying success metrics. Kirkpatrick's taxonomy is one seasoned model that continues to receive widespread use. Developed by Dr. Don Kirkpatrick in the 1950s, the model originally contained four levels of training evaluation. Now, the levels have been clarified by Don, Jim, and Wendy Kirkpatrick to form what is called "The New World Kirkpatrick Model". Since the concept has continued to evolve alongside training, it remains a relevant and robust evaluation framework. This evaluation model is applicable to both classroom training and eLearning.