Spent yesterday participating in the Virtual Worlds At Work Symposium talking about using virtual worlds for Sales Training. Thanks to Anders Gronstedt for the invitation.
While most of my development in Second Life has been around new hire training and leadership, I think there’s a really exciting opportunity for using product avatars for consumer education.
Second Life is replete with corporate products created not by the companies but by loyal users. I forget where I heard/read the quote but think it’s a great one:
“Coke was in Second Life before ‘Coke’ was in Second Life.”
The point being that Coke-branded objects were created long before Coke was officially participating in-world.
This hopefully isn’t a surprise since we grew up with these products and are inundated with their marketing every day. Admittedly, one of the first things I created in Second Life was an Apple MacBook that replaced the default typing animation.
So, knowing your customers identify with your brands, use your products and recreate them in virtual spaces, how can you leverage that connection for enhanced consumer training and education?
Consider what it would look like if your company’s products and services could be represented in an anthropomorphic avatar? And, yes, Second Life furries are fun but I’m more interested in using such characters for corporate training and learning.
Enter product-based avatars. They can offer a personal experience that commercials and advertising can’t.
New way for residents to interact with your brands
Product comparisons or better, product debates and town halls could be held;
With virtual worlds, your mascots, products and services can break the fourth wall and actually interact and educate your customers.
Here are just a couple possibilities:
Pharmaceutical/Health Care: Pharm-based avatars could represent different pills and educate users how they interact with each other. (Ever read the back of a prescription bottle? There has to be a better way of showing what I can and can’t take with my meds.)
Mortgage/Financial Services: What would it look like if various avatars represented mortgage products and services? A Conventional fixed-30 could debate with a 5yr ARM product and allow participants to learn about the pros and cons of each depending on the consumer’s needs.
Legal: Avatars representing categories of torts (negligence, nuisance, defamation, etc) could put on a virtual play and learners could ask questions and interact with specific torts.
Just something I’ve been playing around with and I realize there are serious risks involved for some companies.
Maybe one place to start would be internal training. Role play scenarios could take place between your employees with one group as the products and the other as the customer. After some time, the program could evolve and your product-avatars could go “public” and begin working directly with your customers. Of course then the tough questions start coming in.
Could your products hold up in a two-way conversation? Are you willing to find out?
Working with DCCCD, Montse will support the development and integration of Second Life into the Dallas County’s seven colleges.
Dallas County Community College District plans to use Second Life to facilitate experiential learning through role playing, modeling and program building, enabling faculty and students to create simulations related to their areas of academic interest.
DCCCD Island, the location in virtual space where these activities will occur, opened on Thursday, April 3, with a virtual groundbreaking.
In Second Life, DCCCD is co-locating with the University of Texas at Dallas. DCCCD Island residents can travel to UTD’s School of Management Island and its Arts/Technology Island without teleporting, which is the normal mode of travel in Second Life.
If you’re interested in participating or learning more, contact Montse or visit DCCCDs web site for more information.
We recently completed a design project in three months that was scoped at nine.
While I could show you the Visios depicting our design strategy for how we cut corners, enlisted SMEs as developers and reused content, this image pretty much says it all.
Espresso sessions are meant to be informal and conversational without slides or handouts, however, I always prefer to have some sort of live demonstration running when talking about Second Life.
This will be an “espresso” session in every sense of the word. I fly into Orlando two hours before my session. Immediately after my session, I race back to the airport to fly home to Phoenix where I’ll spend my “vacation” packing and preparing for our (official) move to Dallas.
Can ambient sounds be used to enhance elearning scenarios without negatively impacting instructional integrity?
There’s been some great conversation around the use of audio narration in elearning. Both Tom Kuhlmann and Cathy Moore have offered up some excellent examples on the appropriateness of audio narration in courseware.
But what about incorporating background sounds to create a connect from the story to the learner? Can interactive narrative techniques be applied to elearning courseware?
Of course:-) It’s not only possible but elearning designers do it all the time.
It can be effective for
drawing the learner into the content;
changing up the course flow; and
communicating course or module objectives without directly listing them.
After NPR pulled back the curtain, we learned how they’ve successfully incorporated sound effects and background tracks into their narrative programming. As elearning designers, you can leverage NPR’s engaging format to enhance your courseware without having to change your elearning model.
Consider the following example:
The audio was recorded and edited with Apple’s Soundtrack Pro which comes with thousands of loops and ambient sounds. If you’re using another audio editor, you can find dozens of sites online that sell loops, foley and ambient sounds.
Some other possibilities could include:
Safety training: Open the scenario with ambulance sounds, anxious voices calling in the emergency. This could be a black screen (no images) for dramatic effect;
Automotive Service Training: Begin with a door chime then a car engine turning over; drill sounds in the background with conversation loops in the background;
Customer Service Training: Open with “audience” or people talking loops, telephone dial tones and keyboard typing. Next fade in some of your own narrated greetings (”May I help you?”, “Thank you for calling [Company], my name is Walter, how may I assist you?” and so on.)
While I am advocating the use of ambient sounds and loops for intros and scenarios, I am not suggesting you use such formats for heavy content screens.
Research suggests that such use can negatively impact learning.
Clark and Mayer:
“Background music and sounds may overload working memory, so they are most dangerous in situations in which the learner may experience heavy cognitive load, for example, when the material is unfamiliar, when the material is presented at a rapid rate, or when the rate of presentation is not under learner control.”
So much of our corporate elearning is predictable. We go with one (or two) rapid design models, become efficient and crank it out. From the learner’s perspective, once they’ve seen one course, they’ve seen them all. There’s probably a greater risk of cognitive “underload” in most courses:-) I realize this effect won’t be appropriate in all courses, but it’s one way to leverage multimedia learning in your courseware.
So give it a try, run it by your team and customers and be open to feedback. While we might not always have the influence to change our company’s elearning model, it is possible we can affect small parts of it.
The latest versions of Captivate and Camtasia confirm the screencasting & video tutorial industry is quickly evolving. As someone who’s created web-based video tutorials for almost ten years, I’ve tried just about every screen recorder developed.
I still remember recording with HyperCam back in 1998. Trying to capture anything larger than 640×480 required a high end machine and if you wanted to post to the web, you had to get creative with frame rates, key frames and color depth. That’s all changed now and even the Mac has seen viable alternatives to SnapzPro. Most notably is ScreenFlow which was just released a week ago.
If you’re looking for a place to start, you have a lot of choices, but the two most important (PC) applications are still Captivate and Camtasia. Each application offers a very different approach to screencasting so it’s common to find people asking how to go about choosing one or the other.
“Which simulation tool should we use, Camtasia or Captivate?”
I have to smile every time I hear that. It reminds me of another question we often hear in training:
“Should this course be ILT or elearning?”
Let’s jump over the fact we’re asking for solutions before stating our objectives and try rephrasing the question:
“How can we integrate Camtasia with Captivate?”
I’d like to propose this doesn’t have to be an “either-or” decision. Both Captivate and Camtasia are excellent tools with each offering advantages over the other.
Camtasia is the tool of choice for professionally narrated software demonstrations. Lynda, Total Training, and others create their products using full motion, narrated video capture software.
Captivate, in its price-range, is hands-down the best tool for creating software quizzes and interactions. What used to take days and weeks to create by hand, can be done in minutes and hours in Captivate.
Blend these two applications and you have the ability to create best-in-class learning products:
Camtasia for your narrated “Show me” lessons; and,
Included are multimedia storytelling options with published examples and a PDF job aid to hang by your desk. The examples are classic interactive storytelling components that any designer should be familiar with.
What caught my attention was the last bullet in Data-driven graphics:
“Experience with databases, queries and data scraping is fast becoming an important part of interactive storytelling.”
Now, it’s unclear just “who” is learning these new database skills, but I’ll bet they aren’t programmers or developers. Most likely, it’s a journalist, interactive designer or media designer who’s having to learn such competencies.
It’s always interesting to follow the new skills each profession is asked to learn. From doctors and lawyers (finally) learning to use the Internet, to multimedia designers learning adult learning principles, it’s all part of our professional evolution.
Be sure to download the PDF and browse the real-world examples.
Lately I’ve been working on identifying some alternative and cost-effective ways for delivering training. It’s an important area of focus for my group right now.
So tonight, while reading through some white papers, elearning blogs, books and forums, I received a joke via email. As someone who loves (and welcomes) interruptions, I opened and read it. The joke wasn’t the least bit funny, but that’s not the point. The point is, the joke was creatively designed.
The joke was text-based but to get the punch line, you needed to click-drag your cursor between two asterisks. The space between the two asterisks was filled with a white-colored font that, once selected, revealed the answer.
NICE!
I wonder how such a technique could be used as part of a follow-up to an ILT or elearning course? Could such a format be effective simply because it’s different and unexpected? Could it have adverse effects if perceived as a gimmick?
Here’s a quick example I put together:
———-
Three Sources of Leadership Power To be a successful leader, you must understand where power comes from and how best to develop it. There are three sources of power for becoming an effect leader.
The three sources are:
(For the answer, click-drag your cursor from star to star)
* 1. Role power 2. Relationship power; 3. Knowledge power *
———-
OK, so it won’t be part of any formal learning program and you could only get away with it a couple times a quarter, but what a fun and creative way to deliver short, targeted questions for learning.
Kudos to Harper Collins for recently embracing the iTunes model and beginning to offer consumers the option to purchase individual chapters of books (Wall Street Journal).
As someone who purchases too many education and technology books every year, I’m anxious for other publishers to begin adopting similar models. I rarely read a tech book cover to cover but still glean a lot from most of them. Are you listening Pfeiffer? O’reilly?
I wonder how it would look if more corporate elearning courses offered similar choices?
Even today most courses unnecessarily employ full program control. Do you think users would be more inclined to take our courses if they felt they had more navigational control? Maybe.
We know from Clark & Mayer that courses targeted to novice users without a lot of prior knowledge are best designed with higher program control. This means the course follows a more rigid, prescribed path where the learner is essentially “led” through the course or module.
The idea is that novice learners will benefit from being presented the “whole picture” rather than choosing the content they “think” they need. Research validates this and I can live it.
But how much of our corporate elearning is of such complexity that it requires those formats? Does a Level 100Workplace Harassment course really require such a deep knowledge base that users couldn’t view “Quid Pro Quo” before “Hostile Work Environment”?
Too often it seems Training and its learners are less aligned then they could be. I’ve been on both sides of the fence. I’ve consulted with companies who insisted on “compliance mode” (program control) for their users and I’ve managed internal elearning departments where I’ve taken calls from business units pleading to allow their employees to be able to take “part of the course“.
As elearning designers we need to understand there are different types of training content and our course design should reflect those differences. Not all classroom training is the same (lecture, facilitation, lab) and not all elearning is the same, either.
One of the more meaningful books I read last year was Made To Stick. If you’re a learning professional, you need to read this book. There are many great examples on how to make ideas (read: training) “sticky”.
In particular, the Beyond War scenario:
Statistics are rarely meaningful in and of themselves. They will, and should, almost always be used to illustrate a relationship. It’s more important for people to remember the relationship than the number.
When the anti-nuclear missile group, Beyond War, described the out-of-control arms race between the United States and the Soviet Union during the 1980s, no one realized the scale of the growth. Even though a single warhead was enough to decimate a city, the number worldwide had grown to 5,000.
To demonstrate the scale, a Beyond War speaker would pour 5,000 BBs into a metal bucket. BBs are weapons, and the sound of the BBs hitting the bucket was threatening. It was irrelevant whether there were 4,135 nuclear warheads or 9,437. The point was to hit people in the gut with the realization that this was a problem that was out of control.
I love it!
How many elearning designers do you think would have taken the time to create or find a sound effect that simulates 5000 BBs hitting a bucket?
OK, admittedly I Googled for five minutes and couldn’t find any, either. I did, however, have some popcorn and a sauce pan.
A 30-second audio recording of popcorn hitting the pan and one hour of Photoshop/Flash development yielded the following example:
The rest of your course slides could be static and text-based, but what a great way to gain attention for a new chapter or module.
This was just a quick example but hopefully enough of one to demonstrate how a little creativity, combined with intrinsic motivation, can deliver engaging results.
Spent yesterday participating in the Virtual Worlds At Work Symposium talking about using virtual worlds for Sales Training. Thanks to Anders Gronstedt for the invitation.
Lately I’ve been working on identifying some alternative and cost-effective ways for delivering training. It’s an important area of focus for my group right now.
How many elearning designers do you think would have taken the time to create or find a sound effect that simulates 5000 BBs hitting a bucket?
