Imagine this situation: Sandra is back at work from an overseas holiday of three weeks. She meets the department manager in the corridor. “Morning Sandra.” he says. “You’re back. How was your holiday? Did you go away?” Sandra tells him she had a great holiday and went to Italy with her family. “Sounds amazing!” he replies, and continues to his meeting. When she joins her team, her colleague Ella asks about her holiday too. Ella knows Sandra went to Italy and is planning a holiday herself. She asks lots of questions about the hotel, the travel and the food and

We’ve all completed or created software or procedure training, some is very tedious, some is pretty and more engaging with clickthrough exercises – but the big question always is, what do you do want employees to do when two months later they are faced with a certain task and don’t remember how? Would they go back to a 20 minute learning module and search for a solution? Of course not. Job aids to the rescue A clear task-based step by step, or a quick video, easy to locate and easy to use – that is what learners need to support

A number of years ago I worked with a very talented senior elearning designer who delivered brilliant work themselves, but could drive juniors to tears with feedback on their work. Project documents, storyboards would be returned after review with track changes in Word – full of red lines and changed words and sentences. Separate from the fact that this was very discouraging, it did not help junior designers to grow in their abilities. The changes were all made for them, improving the work but with little explanation on how they could improve that work themselves the next time. Subjective vs

At a recent webinar on game writing techniques for learning some attendees asked me for recommended books. Well, this list has some books, but in my world even more comes from interesting talks, blogs and playing inspiring games. READ Emily Short’s Interactive StorytellingEmily is the absolute authority on interactive fiction and game storytelling. She done has deep research on conversation design and flow, review of writing in all types of games, and is an award-winning game writer and designer of interactive storytelling tools. Indispensable reading – and, play her games too.https://emshort.blog/ Short Sims by Clark Aldrich (2020)A highly practical approach

I’ve recently read some really interesting research by Peter Mawhorter et al. about ‘choice poetics’ (Mawhorter, Mateas, Wardrip-Fruin, & Jhala, 2014). The authors look at a choice structure in interactive stories as composed of three elements: framing, options and outcomes. The framing is the content provided when a choice is presented. It can influence how a player/learner interprets the choice. Options are the “clickable” elements that lead to outcomes or consequences (presented when an option is chosen). Options can give rise to expectations about the outcomes, depending on how they are written. Framing and options can interplay and possibly influence

The most important aspect of branching scenarios and interactive stories are the choices presented to the player/learner. Choices are what make interactive stories different from other creative writing outputs such as novels, plays and movies. Writing choices for e-learning scenarios is not easy, and contrary to many examples I see out there, not an alternative way to present a multiple choice quiz! As always, I take my cue for this narrative technique from game design narratives. Your learner’s choices have to fit in a story, in the general feel and the style of writing, and actually reflect much more than