Learning Designer Diaries – bespoke e-learning content techniques
Like many bespoke e-learning designers, I am a big fan of Articulate’s E-Learning Heroes challenges. The openness and inventiveness of the community makes it such a popular resource and I regularly look out for themes that catch my eye. This week’s challenge is ‘Personalize Your E-Learning Courses with Gamification Techniques’ and it set off an idea (in the middle of the night!) that got me thinking.
Creating a personalised experience
Often when creating bespoke e-learning content, we are looking for ways to enable the learner to create their own journey: explore and discover, rather than show and tell. Many programmes are designed to do this at a higher level, through effective blending of learning mediums and balance of formal and informal (often called scaffolded learning). However there are many creative ways to deliver a more personalised experience in the content itself, such as branching scenarios, diagnostics, choosing avatars and enabling learners to customise environments. I wanted to explore we could create a more personalised experience through gamification, putting the learner in control and providing motivation along the way.
I wanted to know if it was possible to hand over control to the user to explore and discover moving around a screen more like you would see in a game – I hadn’t set out to develop this but having woken in the night wondering if this was possible – I found it was!
I haven’t worked on the design aspect here – just functionality, the first part of this is designed to hand over control to the user – they can move about an environment exploring and discovering as they choose.
The second part is the treasure hunt where I have used the idea of having to solve a simple code to find the treasure – but this could be dressed up in many different ways to test different objectives.
Lizzie Wakefield – Digital Designer
