How to Produce Better Learning Results

Does your company produce standard linear e-learning courses, that do not engage learners? It’s time to change that. Learn how creating branching scenarios can improve your work efforts and produce better learning results.

When I created our software for building branching scenarios, I assumed that everybody knew what scenarios were and how scenarios could improve your e-learning. I quickly came to realize that a lot of people had never used or even seen a branching scenario. Instead, they keep producing standard linear e-learning courses that do not engage learners. So, I wanted to help you get started with branching scenarios by answering some frequently asked questions.

Branching scenario is an interactive form of learning. It challenges the learners, requires them to make a decision, and then presents the consequences. Each consequence produces new challenges and more choices. As the learner makes decisions, the story unfolds in unpredictable ways, thereby making such learning interaction engaging and fun.

Branching scenarios are similar to the “Choose Your Own Adventure” books. Only instead of saving a princess from a castle, e-learning scenario narratives are built around dealing with angry customers, negotiating with suppliers, managing employees, and other business-related challenges.

Here are a few examples of branching scenarios:

I know, quizzes also pose challenges and ask for input. The difference is that quizzes are linear. The next question is always the same regardless of what the learner answered before. In a scenario, every response determines what’s next. Scenarios aren’t linear and therefore they are unpredictable and engaging. It means they are fun to play and re-play.

Quizzes often focus on checking learner knowledge whereas scenarios are all about presenting realistic situations and asking for practical choices. Scenarios don’t care what the acronym for that fancy cross-selling technique is, they check whether the learner can actually sell a product to a virtual customer in a realistic setting.

Another significant difference is that quizzes provide straight-on feedback. You got this wrong, you got that right. By comparison, scenarios present consequences of learner decisions and allow the learner to understand whether this particular outcome is good or bad and whether it could be improved in another attempt at playing through the branching scenario. As far as pros and cons go, this is one of the strongest sides of using branching scenarios in e-learning.

Finally, nobody likes quizzes while almost everyone loves scenarios.

Branching scenarios enable learners to put their theoretical knowledge into a practical perspective. How many times have you been in a situation where a manual or instruction makes perfect sense… until you have to actually do it for real? Trying and failing in a scenario quickly highlights the skill and knowledge gaps and improves learning outcomes.

Like all great e-learning, scenarios can challenge you with regards to 3 factors:

I’ll briefly explain each of the caveats (and how to deal with them) below.

As with all new things, expect your first scenarios to take longer to build than you hoped. Authoring a branching script is harder than writing a linear course page by page and it also demands more creativity. Communicating with Subject Matter Experts can be difficult especially if they have never worked with a scenario before.

Building the final product using conventional authoring tools will present challenges of its own. Regardless of whether you use PowerPoint, Articulate Storyline, Adobe Captivate or any other tool, you will still need to create a lot of pages, buttons, actions, layers, etc. It is easy to lose track of which slide leads where and spend a lot of time untangling your branching. Play-testing and quality assurance will also take extra time since you need to play through your scenario multiple times to make sure every branch works.

Best way to avoid spending excessive time? Plan for more time! Seriously, make sure everyone understands that you are building something new and exciting and that you want to make it right so you need an adequate time frame.

Using specialized scenario-building tools like BranchTrack also eliminates the most time-consuming part of the job, i.e. building all the slides. You only need to focus on writing your story, not on placing images on slides or copying and pasting texts.

Scenarios are complex by nature. If they were simple and linear, we wouldn’t call them scenarios, we’d just call them boring. My biggest challenge with my first scenario was that it was growing exponentially. As I created more branches, I had to create more choices. Each choice leads to more branches and I was quickly losing control of what is going on (and running out of whiteboard space).

The best advice for avoiding an overgrown branching scenario is to start at the end. First, define the outcomes of your scenario. In a customer service training scenario, outcomes could be these:

Then work your way up from these outcomes and create a high-level outline of the scenario. What decisions lead to a customer being angry? How did we come into this situation? Where did all of this start? This approach guarantees that your scenario will be manageable and does not result in having twenty different endings that you have to write out.

Of course, having a good way to visualize your scenario is very useful, too. It can range from whiteboards to post-it notes to Excel flowcharts to specialized branching scenario software. The important thing is ease of use, ability to modify it on the fly and collaboration with colleagues and Subject Matter Experts.

Branching scenarios are often the favorite kind of project for e-learning vendors and developers because the time and complexity involved guarantee handsome project budgets. Alas for this same reason many companies do not use branching scenarios in their training and settle for standard linear e-learning courses that are less effective and less engaging.

In my experience -and I have worked on the e-learning vendor side for quite a while-, the cost comes from 3 main factors:

Let’s use the model from the previous section to estimate how much it would cost to build a branching scenario. Coming up with an idea, authoring a draft outline and then scripting the actual flow chart for a branching scenario could require give or take 30 hours from all parties involved. Developing the graphics and building all slides, interactions, and links between them would probably take another 30 hours. Quality assurance, play-testing, gathering feedback, implementing change requests and other post-production tasks would probably require another 20 hours. Of course, these are ballpark figures and a scenario could be much more complex and take much more time but it would be really difficult to build it faster than that unless you are working off a previous project, templates or using a very simple branching structure.

So we are looking at 80 hours of costs for a branching scenario if we are building the scenario in-house. If you are working with an outside contractor, they will probably quote for at least 120 hours. I will leave it up to you to multiply this for the e-learning rate of your choosing but if you are paying under $50 per hour, you are probably not getting the quality you need.

With the right tools, this amount could easily reduce by a factor of two or even three. The scenario authoring would require about the same time, say, 20 hours, and development would be gone, and post-production would go down to 10 hours. This amounts to about 30 hours instead of 80 for a single scenario.

To sum up. The Pros of branching scenarios are:

Cons: