Making employee training engaging is critical to meeting your training goals. Engaging in training sessions increases learner satisfaction and results. This might range from changing behavior to increasing skills and abilities to raising performance standards.
Including branching scenarios in your eLearning programs is one approach to make your employee more engaged in eLearning. However, you must ensure that you get eLearning branching scenarios right because a poor attempt will subtract from the learner experience instead of improving it.
Before we get into the tips for developing excellent branching scenarios, let’s define them.
What Is a Branching Scenario?
A scenario in eLearning is comparable to role-playing scenarios you may have encountered in classroom-based training. In other words, you build a virtual environment scenario and urge the learner to engage with it by making a decision, interacting with someone, making an assessment, and so on.
A branching scenario goes a step further by being multi-level. As a result, a learner’s reaction to one segment leads to a different outcome.
In addition to being engaging, branching scenarios provide a safe environment for learners to deal with difficult situations, make mistakes (and learn from them), and enhance their skills.
However, effectively implementing this strategy is a significant task. Here are five pointers for developing engaging and appealing branching scenarios for eLearning.
1. Recognize and Address Performance, Skill, and Knowledge Gaps
Branching scenarios must focus on specific gaps that impede on-the-job productivity—for example, a skill required by employees to execute a task. Corporate learners will not engage with online training content that does not answer an instant demand.
They don’t have spare time to sit through a branching scenario that only investigates theoretical knowledge. Instead, it must focus on typical issues that employees face daily. LMS apps data, online surveys, assessments, and focus groups are excellent tools for identifying these gaps and developing more tailored branching scenarios.
2. Include eLearning Characters and Situations That Are Relatable
The primary goal of incorporating branching scenarios into your eLearning course is to give learners hands-on experience and assess real-world reactions. As a result, your branching scenario must feature relatable eLearning characters, obstacles, and events that contextualize everything.
Online learners should be able to sympathize with the characters and build emotional connections with them. For example, they should feel the same aggravation or strain as the protagonist when dealing with an unpleasant customer.
As far as possible, structure each branching scenario with a single difficulty or challenge so that learners can focus on one task at a time. This also improves immersion since participants can emotionally participate in the eLearning experience and become acquainted with the cast of eLearning characters.
3. Reduce Development Time by Using a Rapid eLearning Authoring Tool
Many rapid eLearning authoring solutions use pre-built assets to save resources and time. They also feature branching scenario templates, eliminating the need to start from scratch. If your authoring software lacks these assets, search the internet for royalty-free media. Some rapid eLearning authoring solutions even include storyboard templates for structuring your branching scenario.
4. Take the Approach that Every Answer, Correct or Incorrect, is a Learning Opportunity
Scenarios are not like quizzes, which are frequently used to evaluate progress and learning. Instead, branching scenarios serve as a teaching tool.
After all, making mistakes in a branching scenario is preferable to blunders in real-life circumstances. Because the errors participants make in an eLearning course do not affect the functioning of your business, your staff can learn from them.
For example, employees can learn how a decision, plan of action, or strategy affects the result of specific circumstances, either positively or badly.
5. Test
Finally, test your branching scenario. Examine all of the available options to confirm that everything works as planned. You must also ensure that the outcomes are as defined above – realistic, accurate, and believable – and that learners will come to a conclusion or endpoint regardless of the path they take.
Conclusion
You can harness the power of error-driven learning and real-life experience using branching scenarios. Learners can investigate every facet of the work or challenge to determine the optimal method and explore several decision-making paths to determine the ramifications of their actions.
