Using Lessons from Video Games in E-Learning

I'm a child of the 80's. Everyday I am reminded of that by the marketers who want dollars from the 30-something crowd. The fact that I grew up in the 80's puts me in perfect place to see the evolution of video games. Yes, I played Pong back in the day. The Atari 2600 stole hours of my elementary years. I remember text-based games like Zork and Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Castle Wolfenstein brought in the era of first person shooter games for me. SimCity allowed me to create my own little worlds where I could tax and make money. Quake and Goldeneye brought my attention back to FPS games and the Call of Duty franchise has kept me there.

While a lot of folks talk about the negatives of computer games, let me talk about some of the positives. Text-based games like Zork taught me the difficulties of human-machine interface. From SimCity I learned some basics about budgeting and interest rates. The Call of Duty franchise has taught me about many of the weapons used in World War II. I discovered this when I visited a museum with my family and could name all the weapons on display because of my experience with them in the game. That actually took me by surprise. But my point here is that games can be a very engaging way to learn.

There are lessons that can be learned on how to use games in learning. I wrote a blog article last year about what the 80's movie WarGames teaches us about learning games. Some of these lessons are:

• Games can be used to simulate real work situations
• Games should be tied to learning goals
• Games should allow learners to fail and discover winning strategies

The playing of games brings out the same human nature we have at work. That is we don't want to take the time to learn something. We just want to start doing the job and learn along the way. Recently I wrote a blog article called Learning Lessons from Black Ops. In that blog post I wrote about techniques this Call of Duty game uses to teach you about the game as you play (i.e. learning on the job). These techniques include leveraging teachable moments and encouraging you to learn from other players.

From my experience, video games and learning have many synergies. One of my goals as a developer is to incorporate game techniques in learning as much as I can. You don't need 3-D graphics to implement the most important lessons!

SharePoint Observations

I've started to work with Microsoft SharePoint for a lot of projects lately. I'm still fairly new to it. I've only started to seriously work with it over the last year. I thought I'd take a moment to share some observations.

People Don't Use SharePoint

People don't use SharePoint because it is not easy to access and documents are hard to find. Now, I know this is not true of all teams within organizations that use SharePoint. I'm sure it is a good solution for a lot of folks. However, what I'm observing is that people simply don't use it.

I'll use my team as an example. We've got a lot of good files on SharePoint. But most of us download those files to our computer and rarely come back to the site. My team does use it to update the status of projects...but they have to be constantly reminded to do so. Frankly, we do it so that our manager stays informed...not for collaborative work. My manager has done a great job or organizing the site and encouraging its use; but, it is rarely used for what it is designed for.

I've been asked to work on projects for other teams in my organization and I have observed the same mentality. These teams also have their own reasons for not using SharePoint:

• The search function doesn't work well
• Files are hard to find
• Its not intuitive
• Storage space is too limited
• Permissions are always getting messed up

Some of these reasons are legit. However, many of these reasons are the result of a poor  implementation or IT issues that were not well thought out. Regardless, I bet I'd hear the same reasons mentioned by other organizations.

What are the Best Practices?

People don't use SharePoint because they have not seen best practices. IT has provided the teamsite space and told people to start using it to store shared documents. Chaos has ensued. People ask "we already have a shared folder, why do we need SharePoint just to share documents?" Good question. SharePoint is not meant to be a document repository alone. It is a collaborative workspace for teams. The problem is that most of the teams I've observed have no clue what the best practices are for creating a collaborative workspace...so they don't.

Improving SharePoint

I'm starting to be asked to work on some projects that leverage the strengths of SharePoint (document management, permission structure, versioning) but that fix some of the short comings I mentioned before. In particular, ease of use and quick access to information.

There are ways that SharePoint can be customized. Depending on the complexity of the project built-in customizations can certainly improve the usability.  You can add in content, remove unnecessary links, and more. But you still can not fully customize the look and feel of a teamsite without additional development work.  There is server-side coding that can be done to fully customize a SharePoint environment but IT owns this and there are certain expenses and overhead associated that can make this choice less than ideal.

I've been looking into SharePoint web services lately. There appears to be a lot of information that can be accessed through SharePoint web services. Since the web services can be accessed through JavaScript, no server-side coding is required. This means the overhead of getting IT involved can be avoided. However, it does require an experienced web developer. For me, this is promising for some of the e-learning and knowledge management projects I deal with.

Summary

Those are just a few of my observations starting out with SharePoint. What have been your observations?

Bullets are Bad, Questions are Good

Over the years I've encountered several courses about how to write good e-mails. They have all come to me in the same way -- a list of dos and don'ts. Frankly, it's not the way to describe it in a face-to-face setting and especially a bad idea in e-learning. Bulleted lists turn learners into zombies.

So the list comes in looking something like this:

• Use correct spelling
• Use correct capitalization
• Avoid all caps
• Skip lines between paragraphs
• Avoid fancy fonts
• Don't go crazy with the font colors
• Use bold to show emphasis

Who wants to read a list like that? More importantly, who is going to remember this? Let's turn it into a question using examples of the behavior discussed.

Which would you prefer as a learner? More importantly, which is the learner likely to remember after taking the course? I strongly argue to do what you can to turn a bullet list into a question or some other type of engaging content. Bullets are simply bad in e-learning.

How have you handled boring bullet lists?

Enhancing Captivate Development with PowerPoint

Since delving into learning content development a few years ago, I've been continually impressed with Microsoft PowerPoint's capabilities. It has awesome enhancements for photos and graphics, it has rich animation building capabilities, and it has a super easy user interface. Those are just a few reasons I like it.

But I do e-learning development and the tool I am using most often these days is Adobe Captivate. I still leverage PowerPoint whenever I can.  For example, I use PowerPoint to create transparent PNGs (see my post from another blog) that I can use in my Captivate projects. I also take photos and enhance them using picture styles and effects. Just about any thing you do in Powerpoint, you can either export in PNG format or take a screen shot of it. I've even seen developers take screen videos of PowerPoint animations.

A lot of learning content already exists in PowerPoint. For example, many of my projects start off with a PowerPoint slide deck that was either a storyboard or a presentation used by face-to-face instructors. Captivate can be used to import PowerPoint presentations (see my post from another blog) saving you the work of cutting and pasting or redeveloping parts of the training. I would never recommend using the slides from a face-to-face presentation as e-learning. However, you can import pieces of it such as backgrounds, icons, charts, infographics, or animations to integrate into your e-learning module.

The reality is I rarely never use just one tool when developing a complete e-learning project. There are a variety of tools I use to take on a project. Any master of a craft has a collection of tools and knows the best time to use them. Is PowerPoint one of your tools?

Articulate understands the practitioners...learn the lesson

I've been in the software industry for a long time and I've never seen the perfect product. As I've been reading all the hype on Articulate Storyline this week, I am reminding myself of that. It looks like a great product. But a game-changer...not likely.

A software tool is not a game-changer but a community of practitioners can be. I agree with R.J. Jacquez when he lists Articulate community as his number one reason to appreciate Articulate Storyline. It is how we use the content authoring software that really matters. Articulate gets this and has created a software tool that is in response to its community demands. That is where I believe Articulate creates competitive advantage.

Community driving software development...that's how to build a great product. Lectora? Captivate? Where you at? There are lessons to be learned here. I think one lesson is this:

Where the company wants to be is not necessarily where the community of practitioners wants to be. But, in the end the community is who drives the adoption of software.

There is a key distinction that's important when listening to community. The difference is between listening to features that the community wants and listening to what the community wants to do. I think Articulate is focused on the latter while many companies focus on the former.

There are a lot of creative content developers out there looking for tools to express themselves to their fullest. Let's build better communities and better software!