The most common question we hear related to game-based learning is… does it really work? And that’s a question that has been difficult to answer using actual research… until now. Last week, the University of Central Florida released a new study that shows math scores increasing when presented using game-based learning.

Up to now, most of us assumed as much. It seems pretty obvious that it’s more enjoyable to play a game than to sit through a class. And we can probably safely assume that since it is more interactive, it might be more readily applied.

Last week, the University of Central Florida released a new study that seems to provides some qualitative evidence that game-based learning is more effective than more traditional teaching methods.

The study was conducted with 193 high school math students over the course of 18 weeks. The students were split into two groups: those who played the interactive math videogame as part of their coursework, and those who did not. The game itself contained traditional videogame elements such as 3-D graphics, sound, animation, and an immersive storyline.

The results indicated a significant difference:

• Students in the test group, which played the videogame as part of their learning, showed an 8.07 point increase in their math scores.
• Students in the control group, which did not play the videogame, showed a 3.74 point increase in their math scores.

Just as significantly, both the students and teachers felt that the videogame component truly made a difference not just in how the students learned the material, but also in how much they wanted to learn it. Students remarked that the videogame elements made the learning fun, while teachers noted that having math concepts in a videogame enabled many students to conquer a phobia of math.

This is only one study, and it is far from definitive, but it is some good science to support what most of us have known.

If anyone knows of other studies supporting or dispelling the use of game-based learning, let me know.

I was manning the Digitec booth at the Society of Pharma and Bio-Tech Trainer’s (SPBT) Conference in Orlando last week and had the opportunity to sit in on an excellent session by Doug Stevenson on Story Theatre. Being a theatre guy, his booth caught my eye, and I ducked into his session. He has a really interesting approach to creating dramatic and memorable learning. While his session was directed more to trainers and stand-up instruction, I think eLearning designers can apply these nine steps to create really effective eLearning.
Doug reinforced, though, that you need to choose a story with one very specific educational point in mind. We’ve all sat in on classroom training, and probably suffered through long-winded stories that didn’t seem to have a point. Doug’s advice is to make sure that your stories have a single focused point. Next, a good story will be personal, and it is set at a moment of crisis. Visualize a crisis you faced in the past, one that illustrates some instructional point. Okay, got a story? Now, follow these steps to make it memorable:

1. Set the scene. Establish a sense of place and dig deep for the details to bring that scene to life. Establish the exact time, specifics on the place, the emotion. Now, paint that picture. Use video, audio, whatever, but use details.
2. Focus on a main character. The most memorable stories I’ve ever heard were confessional. Think about how powerful it is to confess your own personal blunder. But they don’t have to be personal to be memorable. Your story should focus on a main character facing a crisis.
3. Begin the journey. Here, you want to focus on action. What is the main character doing, specifically when the crisis occurs? Action is the heart of drama, so choose a story where the main character is doing something meaningful.
4. Encounter the obstacle. This should be the climax of the story. Who does the main character confront? What happens? Doug acted out the scene onstage, which worked really effectively. For eLearning, consider using video with professional onscreen talent to achieve this. I know it’s expensive, but you get what you pay for, and the minute your audience sees Joan from HR trying to act, you’ll lose the suspension of disbelief that a story conveys.
5. Overcome the obstacle. While Doug didn’t suggest this, an eLearning technique to acheive this may be to leave the story hanging at that crisis. Then you can introduce your instruction while you’ve got the learner’s attention. Hopefully, you’ve established a sense of urgency and anticipation that will keep them engaged. You can then come back to the crisis to look at how the main character dealt with the obstacle. Here’s where incorporating short video segments into your eLearning will help convey the story more effectively than words.
6. Resolve the story. Pretty obvious, here. Remember, use poetic license as necessary to make sure the resolution reinforces your one single point. Lie, whenever necessary. Remember Blanche DuBois’ famous line in Tennessee Williams’ Streetcar Named Desire: “I don’t tell truths. I tell what ought to be truth.”
7. Make the point. Doug describes this as “sticking the landing.” Like a gymnast doing a dismount, make your point, then salute. Don’t ramble or stumble. For eLearning, make sure this point is made clearly. Doug’s suggestion was to even frame the message with: “What that experience taught me was….” This approach ensures clarity of message, and I completely agree.
8. Ask the question. Here, you are trying to evoke personal reflection. Has this ever happened to you? The irony is that a story is really memorable when it’s personal and universal. The learner must relate! For eLearning, consider posting the question to a forum. I’ve been pleasantly surprised at how strong the responses are, and it creates a great sense of community among the learners, too.
9. Restate the point. Pretty obvious. It’s that “rule of three” I learned writing for theatre. If you want the audience to remember something, you need to mention it three times.

So those are the 9 steps. My thanks to Doug Stevenson for this session. While attendance at the conference was disappointingly low, this session made the event worthwhile.

Dick Hofmann at Digitec found this link off YouTube, and it’s so apt, based on what I heard at the eLearning Guild conference earlier this month, and what I see teaching my college students.

This is a challenge we all need to meet… and we’re running out of time.

Next Gen Learning video

So the eLearning Guild 08 Gathering just wrapped up in Orlando, and there were some really good sessions. I moderated a session on “What does the Next Gen Learning Experience Look Like.” Even though the session was held a 7:15 am on Tuesday morning (and I hadn’t slept at all the night before), we had a good group and a productive session. These are the results of our collective brainstorm.

Next Generation Learner

With recent studies showing that 40% of the workforce will retire by 2015, we used the “21st Century Students Deserve a 21st Century Education” survey of 1.2 million K-12 students, teachers, administrators and parents representing over 14,000 schools in all 50 states. This seemed like the obvious place to start, since this group will constitute our target audience in a few years.

So to predict what the Next Gen Learning experience might be like, we started by listing what we saw as the trends. Here’s the list we came up with:

• “Always on” connectivity with their peer group
• User generated content, self-publishing video (YouTube), blogging and posting to (MySpace, Facebook)
• Social connectivity, accessing a looser set of networks more casually for problem solving, companionship or just to feel connected to a larger group
• Gamers, with nearly a 50% split between males/females enjoying console or computer games

Based on these trends (which are certainly not exhaustive), we tried to imagine the type of learning environment that would engage this profiled learner. Here’s what we came up with:

• Bite-sized intruction – the group pretty much agreed that an instructional session longer than 40 minutes would be deadly. Ideally, ten minutes is even better.
• Context-heavy – The Next Gen Learner is less likely to accept an instructor’s opinion of the importance of the content.
• Embedded learning – Rather than “force-feed” content, learners seem to want more “just-in-time” learning that they can access only when they need it.
• User-generated content – Based on the research, students value creativity and teamwork, moreso than the Boomer or Gen X, so more project-based instruction and constructivist styles would be more effective.
• Scenario-based/role-play – Learners are used to virtual worlds where there are multiple choices that can be made, rather than one correct answer.

What Does Nex Gen Learning Look Like?

We agreed that we may need to rethink the traditional form of assessment, looking at outcomes first and perhaps measuring assessment through job performance, rather than based on arbitrary learning requirements or test scores.

We need to foster the creativity to allow learning to be ad-hoc, continual and learner-directed. This continuing education model may require managers to play a larger role in professional development and performance assessment. This could actually take the form of learning through special projects – acheiving a true constructivist model that encourages creative thinking and decision making.

Finally, the tools for learning need to be portable to many devices, so that learning occurs on-demand, when learners need it, rather than when we decide they need to learn. These “job aids” may need to include performance support, featuring interactive multimedia.

So that’s the recap. This was a really cool exercise, and this type of mind-experiment is a great way for educators to continually leverage new media and technology to explore better ways to evolve and adapt to the nex gen learner.

So in prepping for our upcoming session at the eLearning Guild Conference in Orlando, on April 15, I’ve been doing a bunch of research on the trends in learning management systems.

I ran across a really good white paper by Ecto, titled: In search of the next generation online learning environment. The thing that really impressed me was one quote in particular:

Throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, classroom pedagogy was characterized by one-way, teacher centered/text-book-centered delivery of single-media information to students whose role was that of passive receptor.

This is dead on, and those days are gone. How are today’s learners learning? Well, it’s collaborative; it’s social, and it’s quasi-connected. So how do learning management systems accommodate for these qualities?

According to the 2007 eLearning Guild 360 report, the Department of Labor studies show that 70% of our learning is “informal” or non-classroom, then why do we continue to turn to an outdated “classroom” teaching mode to model our learning environments? These don’t reflect how we’re learning or how we’re living.

I’ve been teaching Humanities as an adjunct on the college level since ’95, and I miss the days of standing in front of a classroom, interacting with live students, but this approach is fast becoming ineffective. It’s not that it’s just passive; it’s no longer engaging to the 21st Century mind. We can’t continue to model systems on this delivery method, exclusively.

So how do we create the Next Gen learning environment? The key is in turning to the use-case. Let’s do some old-fashion learner analysis to see what needs to be learned and how. Then let’s design a system that not only allows but encourages that behavior. If necessary, let’s include technology that doesn’t even exist yet. Maybe that will force us to consider near-term alternatives, creatively brainstorming an iterative approach to the next platform, rather than cherry picking from an outdated feature listing.

As we’ve developed the Knowledge Direct platform, we’ve continually asked ourselves “how and when would a learner user this?” If there’s no clear vision, then it’s probably just a feature, and not a function that will benefit the learner, administrator, instructor or content manager.

In my opinion, Next Gen learning needs to focus on continuing education, with learning portals that create centralized access to layers of interest — sort of a true object oriented approach to learning. I run a technology company; I teach Ancient/Classical and 21st Century Humanities, but I also write stage plays. So I need a portal that centralizes just-in-time and filtered RSS feeds on those subjects, so I can continually develop and connect with resources to help me succeed. I need to be in control of my learning. But as long as we refer to training as a “learning event”, it implies a singular, non-recurring interruption in our lives. This is wrong.

Learning must be continual, and we have a responsibility to invent a world that encourages that.

It seems as though Web 2.0 is pushing everyone in IT to change the paradigm, making the online experience more user-focused and experiential. And eLearning is no exception. Nowadays, a simple drag and drop “game” can hardly be considered “game-based eLearning.” So then what is considered “good game” by Web 2.0 standards, in terms of game-based eLearning?

The short answer is “game,” and what makes a good game isn’t unique to Web 2.0. It’s always been true of games. It’s about strategy. A good game is one that sets a goal that can be attained in more than one way and provides a variety of success and fail combinations. And strategy needs to revolve around the choices a player makes.

Yes, this means your eLearning needs to support multi-pathing. It needs to be non-linear, but it doesn’t need to be daunting. So even though you might need to throw out the traditional eLearning precept of “scope and sequence,” you can still simplify.

Game Play

Remember how the classic board games used to come with a dog-eared pamphlet that had the rules, objectives and how to play? That’s a great way to look at designing effective game-based eLearning, too. It comes down to those three sections.

Objectives:

Consider a sales training game. Don’t throw out your learning objectives. Instead, focus on the terminal learning objectives and align these with the performance objectives for the game. If a sales person needs to close 30% of sales, then the game objective might be that the “Player needs to engage with the animals in the dark forest of Trade Show Wood. To win, the player needs to use their selling skills to focus on the right prospects and sell the right product to the right animal in order to emerge from the woods.”

Rules:

Any good game has rules, and the best games have SIMPLE rules. From a Web 2.0 perspective, these rules equate to defining the business rules for the game. If you’re designing sales training, the rules have to state that a player has to successfully respond to the prospect’s questions to win credibility and make the sale. If the player continually misses the mark, the rules need to state that if the player continually loses credibility, they should lose the sale. If they lose more than 30%, they lose the game. Keep it simple! And try not to require players to access “resources.” Players will smell learning and get turned off, but once they figure out that if they access these, they’ll win, you won’t need to force it.

How to Play:

Forgot those long tutorials! A great rule of thumb for teaching players how to play is to avoid a long extracted “intro”. When people think of games, they want to play not watch, so when you have a long intro Flash animation, players will typically skip this. Instead, have a set of Help files that  players can access along the way. Or better yet, set a business rule that if a player hits a new event, trigger a short setup scene. Maybe have a character pop in and explain what’s going on.

So if you’re an eLearning designer, go 2.0, and have a good game!

Okay, so I just did a speaking engagement at last week’s Training Tech Solutions conference in Salt Lake City. In years past, this was a great conference, and I had high hopes. They promoted it as the “Best of the Best,” recruiting past sessions that were rated by attendees as definitely worth seeing again. Unfortunately, the session just never took off and was disappointing on a lot of levels.

First off, who would “redo” a presentation they gave a year ago? Come on. Elearning technology changes so rapidly, a six month old presentation would already be outdated. I ended up spending about 20 hours researching and updating our gamespace continuum model. So you can imagine the disappointment when (as the last speaker on the last day) I only had about 12 attendees for the 2 hour workshop session. It wasn’t for lack of interest, I don’t believe. Even on day one, there were MANY empty sessions. The attendees just didn’t show.

And neither did the conference support. Late in the game, Digitec was offered a 30 minute sponsored session to demo our product. I clearly wrote up the sponsored session description: Using PowerPoint, Direct-to-WEB and Knowledge Direct WEB to produce game-based learning using PowerPoint. Pretty clear. But the attendees who showed up slammed me on my evaluation sheets for “promoting product” during the session. Yet, that’s what a sponsored session does. And when there was no session support and no electricity for my laptop (or support to help), it didn’t help matters that my demo crashed mid-game. Turns out that I plugged into the podium, which of course had no juice.

The other disappointment was that my company invested in exhibiting in Salt Lake, and the trade show hall was empty. In fact, Learning.com — our neighbors across the aisle — folded up shop just before the conference opened and left town. I guess they knew something we didn’t.

Ultimately, what was most disappointing was that the sessions were really good. I sat in on several, and these weren’t the typical “elearning design” talking sessions. The session facilitators used a lot of hands-on activities, great samples and very compelling case studies. High points were Susan Boyd and her discussion on job aids and Anne-Marie Sutch-Stabio and her session on gaming.

It’s just too bad Training didn’t get the turn-out.

So, it seems like everyone’s going back to school… including me. I’ve been teaching college English and Humanities as an adjunct since 1991, and after last Fall, I needed a serious sabbatical. I was questioning my ‘part-time profession.’ Standing in the shadows of those great educators that shaped my life, I asked myself: “Can teaching online really make a difference to someone’s life?” Not certain that I could answer that, I took a break to re-assess.

The Great Education Debate

There’s a continued debate about online versus instructor-led training. In the business world, where I live and breathe during the daylight hours, Human Resources and Training departments across the globe bemoan the continued corporate push towards eLearning. They’ve led workshops and in-class instruction, and they see this movement to online as a way to improve not the quality of the education, but the economics. And I’ll admit that I felt this way too when I began teaching online. As I designed my courses for online delivery, I saw myself losing the opportunity to be in the classroom, to interact with my students to perhaps influence them, as I had been influenced. I suppose that led to my hiatus. I was drained. In order to try and replicate the very best of an in-class experience, my eLearning design took more and more time, with less and less perceived personal gratification.

Student-centric learning

Let’s try to look at this debate dispassionately. What is the goal of the educational process? To expose the learner to some content, yes, but it’s also to: provide access to a community of learning that encourages personal reflection and active engagement; to expose learners to alternate opinions and perspectives; and to encourage a love of learning that will prompt students to continue their study, even after the class is over. Can all this be accomplished, online?

Instructors and teachers are often natural performers. They enjoy being the center of attention. The best classes I’ve ever attended were more “performance” than they were instructional. And this is great. It’s a critical component of education — exposing learners to content and to someone with an enthusiastic love of learning. Do we need to lose that? eLearning is by definition more student-focused. It has to be. Often, there is no set class meeting time or day, and there may be no instructor at the front of the class. So how can we create powerful learning in a student-centric way?

Top Ten ELearning Design Tips

So here are my top ten tips to encourage student-centric learning:

1. Speak to me.

This doesn’t just mean write second-person to the learner, but it means doing your homework as an eLearning designer to continually evaluate the content: “does the learner really need or want to know this?” If it doesn’t meet that test, then it’s not student-centric.

2. Keep it relevant.

This relates back to number 1, but warrants repetition. Continually make connections between the content and the learner. Why should I care? What does this have to do with me? If you are creating sales training, answer the question: “How will this increase my sales?” This is what the learner needs to know to keep the content relevant and engaging.

3. Tell the story

Most of us had a high school teacher who told the most interesting stories. I’ll bet, looking back, that’s what you remember, rather than what was on the test. Don’t lose that. Use scenario-based instruction to create a story of context for the content. Think in terms of what situations would exist that would require the learner to remember the content. Create those situations in your eLearning.

4. Encourage exploration.

As an educator, your first inclination might be to teach everything, which leads to boring eLearning that features lots of “click next to continue” instruction. Instead, design a “streamline” version of your course, with peripheral content available through weblinks and resources. You’ll be surprised how many learners will access these and retain more than they would otherwise.

5. Allow for practice.

The rule of thumb in eLearning design is meaningful interaction every five to eight screens. Even if these are only questions on the previous topic, make sure to create opportunities for the learner to practice applying the concepts.

6. Create community

This can be difficult in an online environment, but it is extremely helpful to provide forums, blogs and discussion boards that encourage learners to connect with others involved in the class. Allow them to relate their own stories or challenges to offer the other learners a chance to establish relevance from someone other than you.

7. Allow for reflection.

This is one of the most overlooked facets of eLearning. Reflection is the process by which the learner carefully considers the content and decides how it applies. This can be accomplished by crafting discussion board questions, rather than answers. Have your learning community come up with the answers, after they’ve had time to reflect on their response.

8. Adapt to learning styles

We know that different learners have different learning styles — visual, aural, tactile, etc. Try to accommodate these through the instruction. Design visuals or animations that directly reinforce the ideas you are trying to communicate. Use voice-over narration, along with text captioning to accommodate that style. Incorporate games and activities that will engage tactile learners.

9. Keep it short.

The standard seems to be that moving online will reduce training time by approximately 25%. This usually results from objectively analyzing your content and editing what the learner doesn’t need to know. Keep your narration direct and succinct. Streamline your delivery. Keep the content relevant, and shorter can be better.

10. Evaluate!

So often after designing an eLearning course for a client, I’ll ask the training department how it’s going, and they have no idea. The ADDIE model was supposed to be cyclical, where the “Evaluate” phase establishes improvements that are integrated into another “Analyze” phase. Keep a “Lessons Learned” file active during the course, that you commit to returning to at least six months later. This will force you to continually improve the course and keep the instruction current.

The continued debate

Which one’s better — online or instructor-led. I was fortunate enough to attend one of those “small liberal arts colleges back east,” so that has been my prejudice. But in teaching online, I have students who are single moms, soldiers in Iraq, people struggling to survive. Without online learning, they wouldn’t have access to an education at all. So maybe that’s the greatest reason for creating the best learning environment we can – online or in-class.

In Justin Peters’ article in Slate “World of Borecraft“, he bemoans the earliest examples of game-based learning. Remember Reader Rabbit? How about Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing? Let’s face it. They may have been goofy, but these applications were the earliest examples of eLearning design. Back in the 1980s, these pioneers were out there trying to lure eyeballs away from the TV and turn the computer into a teacher.

Okay, so the results were imperfect, from a games standpoint. No matter how many of those little bugs you managed to keep off your windshield by madly typing away, Peters contends that these “games” just weren’t that much fun. He asserts that given an alternative, kids would Alt-Tab over to their first-person shoot-em-up game in a heart beat. And I have no doubt that he’s right.

As an educator, I too realize that some of my students would probably rather be watching the latest episode of the Spiderman saga or playing Halo than take my online Flash-based Humanities course. No matter how many cool eLearning games I build on Greek art and architecture, let’s face it, if you’re not into the Parthenon, those games are just more bugs hitting the windshield.

So should eLearning strive to compete against these commercial games? I contend that no matter what we do in eLearning design, a game will not teach, by itself. There needs to be some level of intellectual curiosity on the part of the learner. But the eLearning designer needs to earn this intellectual curiosity. How? Certainly, leveraging game theory and popular game design can help a great deal. I can recall when I began to teach writing in a computer lab, asking the students to turn off their computers before I began to teach. Why? Because more than once, I caught them playing solitaire while I was lecturing.

Since those early days, I’ve moved to a blended environment. Now, when we meet in the lab, I’ll often catch my students playing my Flash drag and drop games. And they’ll react just as sheepishly, as if they’ve been caught playing solitaire!

There are a lot of distractions to education. But if we can use game-based learning and game play strategies, we can hopefully better engage the learner throughout the eLearning experience. If they’re engaged, maybe they’ll be more receptive to the content, and maybe more learning can occur. So I think games can teach eLearning designers a lot.

One thing that Peters is right about. Today, we’re up against some steep competition, not just from Hollywood anymore, but from Electronic Arts. If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em.

The New Game of Life

The drag about life is that once you learn the ropes, it’s over… right? Or is it? Hasbro has just announced an update to their classic Game of Life, and this reincarnation might actually teach us something — something that we need to apply to eLearning design and development.

In a recent International Herald Tribune article Meanwhile: Love and debt, The Game of Life Lawrence Downes really took me back. Among his priceless observations of Hasbro’s original “Game of Life” was its meandering but overly simplified path to retirement — a game experience that made Downes: “…long for the solace of death.”

In the new game, you don’t just have two “paths” in life — college or career, but several other ways to play the game. And in “The Game of Life Twists and Turns,” fulfilment is based on more than just money. It’s about money, education, family and fun. Instead of a linear path, this game is circular, allowing you to play until time runs out. Art mirrors life. Who knows? With more dimensions and choices, maybe this time we’ll actually learn that life is more than just chance — and more than filling up a plastic car with pink and blue plastic spikes and earning more cash than the next guy.

Failing Forward and Game-based Learning

Choices, choices. Since the early 90s when I started out in eLearning and training, we’ve seen the benefits of simulations and game-based learning approaches. These force the learner to make choices — choices that often lead to failure. That’s why “The Game of Life” offered such great potential. If software can teach us how to fly a plane, maybe it could also teach us something about learning those life lessons, before we make those crucial mistakes.

John C. Maxwell’s book “Failing Forward” reinforces the value of failure in learning and success. It’s not about failure. It’s about strategy — learning what works and doesn’t work and trying something different. The great thing about games and game-based learning is that when it’s done right, it teaches strategy and failing forward.

Life Simulations

Right now, Digitec is developing a life simulation for a game-based learning project. And I can relate to Hasbro’s original design. In fact, it was really difficult not to try and apply linear thinking or value judgements in designing the game. After lots of blue-sky sessions and heated discussions, let’s face it, there are so many possibilities, that the algorithms made our head’s spin.

But that is also the beauty of the game. In a true constructivist learning approach, players (NOT learners) create their own learning experience. To begin the game, they choose their Big Dream. It’s eLearning, but there are no tests and no “Click Next to Continue” buttons. Players learn the game by living it, reacting to snags and events by making decisions and learning strategy. They might fail right away, amassing piles of debt, living in the cardboard box. They might play again and buy a house they can’t afford. Eventually, maybe they’ll employ some strategies to get that education, earn a promotion and achieve that Big Dream.

During focus group testing on the 18-24 year old demographic, players wanted to keep playing until they beat the game — earning the lush retirement, private island or castle. So it was still about play — about competition, but along that meandering path, they might just learn something, too.

I want the blue car.

Okay, so from doing speaking engagements at conferences, I’ve attended quite a few on eLearning — and sat in on some sucky presentations, as I think we all have. You can usually tell, right? These people look good, have an impressive bio, a clever presentation title (!), open strong, and then… well, nothing. It usually takes about 12 minutes, in my opinion. At the 13 minute mark, that’s when you look around and realize you made the critical error: you sat way too far from the door to slip out, discreetly.

Anyway, in those cases, what can you do? Sometimes, (rarely with the really sucky ones), the presenter will start out by saying: “Hey, if you start to realize this presentation is not for you, feel free to leave. It won’t hurt my feelings!” But I think it would rarely occur to a really bad presenter to start out this way.

I know a lot of people who just bolt, but being a presenter — and having taught at the college level for 10 years, I guess I’m a little more sympathetic. You can learn from anybody, right? — even if it is learning how NOT to run a session.

But I just learned that the Training Conference has taken a really interesting approach to this. They contacted me because of a presentation on Game-based Learning I did at a Training Conference a couple of years ago. They said that based on the participant feedback, mine was judged as one of the “Best of the Best,” and they want me to speak at the next Training conference in Utah, this October.

Okay, so this is smart on so many levels. (1) You appeal to a presenter’s innate pride — okay, ego — and I’m sure they’ll pull in a lot of the presenters they’ve contacted to do their sessions. (2) The folks who put on the show are going to see an increase in their tradeshow business. As a small business owner, we don’t have the deep pockets that some of these large monster companies have. The best opportunity we have to meet people (aka. prospects) interested in Game-based Learning is to speak at a session and then do ‘booth duty.’ Yes, I confess, I can be a shameless sales guy. Finally (3), the participants at the conference get better quality sessions. Hopefully, they really mean it, when the folks at Training say this is the “Best of the Best” and all of us can benefit from a great learning experience.

I guess we’ll find out in October. Just in case, make sure not to sit too far from the door.

Playing with Media-Savvy Learners

Tony DiRomualdo‘s article on Wisconsin Technology Network makes some really insightful comments, connecting game-based learning and “media-savvy workers,” who turn out to be not only the young, but also people like us! Let’s face it, you don’t have to be a Gen X’er to be bored by traditional eLearning.

And it’s not just eLearning, I’m seeing this trend in the corporate workplace, as well as academia, where I teach online Humanities courses to a lot of media-savvy students. Basically, they’re connected big time. They’re posting to MySpace, they’re blogging, they’re hooked wirelessly, and yet when they come to work or school, they’re feeling inhibited. I even had one of my student volunteer to digitize some History channel documentaries and host the streaming video. Why? Not because he was a techno-geek, but because he wanted an engaging learning experience that included more resources than I, his teacher, could provide. Learning becomes a collaborative experience, which media savvy people demand.

In the last 15 years of doing eLearning development, I’ve seen the growing fear of technology from those who are afraid to relinquish their control — whether it’s control of information or control of the classroom. But the media savvy natives want the ability to free-form their way through work or school. They want to collaborate and contribute.

So what does all this have to do with game-based learning, or eLearning in general? We need to stop following the paradigm of the classroom — forcing learners into the “click next to continue” model — which is basically saying: “I know what and how you need to learn this content, so l sit back and watch.” That model is dead, or at least it should be.

Unfortunately, too often eLearning management systems are helping to keep this model alive. With early SCORM conformance standards often dictating a simplisitic linear approach, learners aren’t finding engagement. True, the latest versions of SCORM are allowing some non-linear approaches to eLearning development, but you have to be a rocket scientist to figure them out.

Game-based eLearning Approaches

So what does this trend mean? Sure, we need to adhere to eLearning standards, but designers need the ability to push themselves to create more engaging eLearning, using game strategies to increase collaboration, competition and self-directed learning.

What should eLearning look like? To find out, we need to stop exerting total control over the learning process and stop using standards issues as an excuse to produce linear learning. It’s time to get as creative as those media-savvy workers and give them what they want — engagement.