The Evolution of Scenario-based Learning
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Presentation given as part of Game+Learning+Society 11 Conference, July 2015 (View Notes tab for presentation transcript) Abstract: Scenario-based learning is a technique intended to engage and motivate the learner by immersing them into authentic situational contexts to allow them to practice skills prior to mastery. Follow along as we explore the iterative process of Capella University’s Course Media team through their six years of designing, writing, and developing a handful of gameful, scenario-based products. Through this, at times, messy process, how their approach becomes subsequently honed and redefined is captured, along with a summary of key takeaways to consider for the success of others embarking along similar paths. GLS Conference Proceedings Paper: https://www.academia.edu/14690804/The_Evolution_of_Scenario-Based_Learning
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The Evolution of Scenario-based Learning
- 1. The Evolution of Scenario-based Learning Estelle Domingos Interactive Designer Capella University Justin Lee Lead Media Designer Capella University
- 2. • Competency-based, online university • Over 35,000 current learners • 71% of learners enrolled in graduate programs • Average learner age is 40 years old
- 3. 2010
- 5. • Nearly 400 characters • Over 30 scene locations • Entire city map • 110 scenarios in dozens of courses
- 6. 2013
- 7. • Masters in HR Management • New Engine based on Web Standards • First-person approach • 19 scenarios in 9 courses
- 9. • PhD in Leadership in Education Administration • 8 scenarios in 3 courses • Complex branching, detective- style exploration
- 10. • MSN/MHA in Health Informatics • 24 scenarios in 8 courses • Authentic information gathering and critical analysis
- 11. Present
- 12. Future
- 13. Key Takeaways • Choose a technology that is flexible and supportive • Test, reflect, explore • Understand your audience • Get involved in the process early and often Thank you!
Hinweis der Redaktion
- Slide 1 Hi I’m Estelle Domingos, I’m an interactive designer at Capella University And Hi, I’m Justin Lee, I’m the lead media designer at Capella University Ok, first, before we jump right into the meat of the presentation, we want give you some foundational information about Capella so you have an understanding of where we’re coming from, our perspective.
- Slide 2 Capella is a competency-based, online university focusing on graduate level education, with 71% of our current 35,000 plus learners enrolled in graduate programs. With an average age of 40 year old, our learners are working professionals who see their degree as a way to advance their career. So they put a lot of value on being able to apply what they are learning to their daily work-life. They are already very busy with their 9-5 work schedule, their family, and life in general, so the learning we deliver needs to be both effective and efficient. One way we achieve that is through scenario-based learning, intending to engage and motivate the learner by immersing them into authentic situational contexts to allow them to practice skills prior to mastery. And just to further clarify, these scenarios are NOT “the course”, but instead are presented as a supportive part of the course to enable the learners to apply and practice what they are learning and then bring their scenario experience back into the course for discussion or assessment.
- Slide 3 In 2010 our team was approached with a big opportunity. Prior to this we had used scenarios in our media but mostly on a very small scale. One or two pieces connected by a story. Or, some brief decision-making questions based on a case study. So, when the School of Public Service Leadership approached us it was time for us to think much bigger. They had many undergraduate and masters programs including public safety, public administration, public health and nursing. They wanted to create something that would differentiate their programs with an emphasis on using an interdisciplinary approach. So, we needed to change our thinking from scenarios that addressed the needs of one course to a scenario approach that would meet the needs of an entire school!
- Slide 4 The idea of creating a game-like scenario using a reusable overarching storyline and what we call Riverbend City was born. Riverbend City is a fictitious city we created as the context for the many activities that we planned to create. We started by coming up with a storyline that could be approached from different perspectives. In this case, a train derailment and chemical spill that caused emergency evacuations and an aftermath of concerns and issues to address. Within each activity, the learner visited different places in the city and observed conversations representing many perspectives and approaches to solving a variety of problems that was relevant to them. For example in public health, learners focused on citywide chemical health problems related to the chemical spill.
- Slide 5 Over the course of two years our illustrators and writers created a cast of almost 400 characters, dozens of scene locations, a city map and around 110 activities that spanned dozens of courses. At the time Flash was the primary development and design tool for interactivity, so our developer created a custom Flash framework to empower designers to create pieces with little to no development needed. And, because we had only one developer we had to limit the amount and kinds of interactivity we used in order to get the “city built.”
- Slide 6 Let’s fast forward three years…2013. Another big opportunity comes along…this time requiring a program wide approach. So, less broad than covering the needs of entire school but still big. In this case our focus was on a master’s program in Human Resource Management. Stakeholders wanted something “like” Riverbend City but also something very different. Through needs analysis, the primary things that we determined is that for these new scenarios to be truly valuable, the learner would need to play a more active role and the media needed to be tied more heavily to the course assessments. Basically there was still value in the larger storyline approach but learners in this program were in need of things like practice making decisions, prioritizing time and ways to gather information, and exposure to real-world, on-the-job situations. In Riverbend City the learner played a very passive, mostly observational role. The fly on the wall in a meeting, or listening to what happened from various perspectives. Since they were usually only tied to discussion questions this worked, but didn’t engage the learners on the level that we now saw that we needed to aim for. Even within the Riverbend project itself there was evolution and a sense of outgrowing what was initially established. We’ll talk about this more later but maybe you shouldn’t create an entire series of simulations on a custom framework that only one developer can update. And when that developer left near the end of the project, we started creating interactivity outside of the simulations and paring it with the existing Flash-based pieces to get around this limitation. As a team we were also making a shift towards working more in Web Standards, so times were changing. Learners wanted a more active role in the media and it was time for us to create that experience.
- Slide 7 Introducing CapraTek--a fictional technology company providing learners an intimate view of the inner-workings of a human resource department—featuring an all new simulation environment, a new engine based on HTML/CSS/Javascript with a first person approach to the content allowing the learner a dynamic role through the discovery of information and choice. Sounds great, and it was… but this project started somewhat like a train derailment just not in Riverbend City this time. Because it was a new approach stakeholders found it difficult to visualize how the final product would look and feel and more importantly how it would be integrated into their courses. They were hesitant to commit to the project until late in the process and we ended up spending a lot of our valuable design and development time convincing them. Many discussions, wireframes, storyboarding, and prototyping later (we’ve probably all been there) we received their tentative trust. One thing that we learned is that this group of stakeholders really needed to see a working model and so a prototype created by a designer on our team ended up being the catalyst for a lot of our communications with them. With a new product and a late start it was an up the last minute finish, which unfortunately didn’t leave much time for QA. Not good in a tentative trust situation. It also didn’t leave much time for thinking about scalability and reusability. However, moving out of the Flash environment and leveraging existing technology (bootstrap) and other technology we were already using in our other media (WS, JQuery) was a big step.
- Slide 8 What about our learner experience? In CapraTek, learners progressed through challenging situations where they needed to prioritize who to talk to, which questions to ask them, and pinpoint which information in the simulation was most valuable. We also introduced richer interactivity such as simple branching interactions and decision points with feedback. After completing a CapraTek activity, the learners used what they learned in the simulation environment and applied it by discussing their insights and writing recommendations for the various problems they were presented with. After a couple quarters of very positive learner feedback it was clear we were heading in the right direction. So, with this next set of projects it was time to take some of the pain out of the process and circle back to important ideas like scalability and reusability (Oh yeah, those!). CapraTek was successfully launched and other programs were taking notice and seeing it as a viable approach for differentiation in their programs. We embarked on two new projects…
- Slide 9 First, Blooming Park School District is a fictitious district located in a large suburb of a major city and is brimming with diversity. It was created for our doctoral level program in Leadership in Education Administration. The Blooming Park scenarios present learners with a variety of diversity-related issues that they may not have been exposed to in their previous work and field experiences. With this project we increased the game-like experience by incorporating more complex branching and detective-style exploration scenes.
- Slide 10 The second project we created was VilaHealth a healthcare system in major metropolitan area that just acquired two smaller healthcare systems. It was created for our masters degree in Health Informatics. VilaHealth gives learners opportunities to gather information in an authentic way and analyze it using critical thinking.
- Slide 11 When we started on these new projects we had the benefit of a stronger codebase from CapraTek that we call the “Capra Engine” and with our fresh set of lessons learned we concentrated more on honing our processes. One of the first things that we changed early in the process was requiring upfront commitment from stakeholders via a scope document. Since we already had a proven product the buy-in this time around was much easier to obtain allowing us to dig into the development phase earlier and to think more about developing our codebase into a more modular and reusable system. However with two projects running at the same time our codebase was forked in two directions and due to time constraints we were not able to keep these as consistent as we hoped (we’re just waiting for the next project!). We also found ourselves preparing for more complex functionality…greater branching, quantifying choices into categories with more robust point and feedback structures. However, we did not have enough time or find an appropriate scenario opportunity to implement these new features (again, just waiting for the next project!).
- Slide 12 So, what does the future hold for scenario-based learning for us at Capella? Well, we have since started to take a product development approach to our scenarios, which is a new perspective versus what we’ve had done kinda flying by the seat of our pants. One big step that we need to do to help us with this is to join the two split codebases into a single codebase and get them into a version tracking system like GitHub. Those two steps would allow for better, more regular, maintenance of the codebase and make it easier to create enhancements for future projects. Some of the enhancements that we’ve been thinking about of course often revolve around getting more complex interactions and deeper content. Specifically, we’d like quantify the choices that the learner makes within the scenario, and be able to the derive a point value based on how they went through the scenario. That opens up a lot of opportunities for motivating learners to retry the scenario to get a better score, we can give then targeted feedback and recommendations based on their score, and we can even send that score back into the course as a grade. Obviously, we don’t work in a vacuum. The whole scenario creation process is a very collaborative one where we work with Instructional Designers, Subject Matter experts, Product managers, Faculty, Deans, you name it. So something that we are getting better at is defining the scenario making process, making it more transparent to the people we work with to be able to communicate with them better.
- Slide 13 So to sum up, what are some key things that you should take away from our presentation today. First, Choose a technology that is flexible and supportive. Any technology based solution needs to be able to grow with you through your challenges and iterations. And make sure that you and your team of builders are familiar with that technology. Second, It’s important to test, reflect, and explore. Whenever you start something new, don’t wait until it’s perfect to get it in front of someone to give it a quick test. And even when you launch something, make sure you have a way to gather feedback and are able to later go back in a make some changes. And get an outsiders perspective. There is so much insight that a fresh set of novice eyes can offer. Third, Be sure to understand your audience. Actually find someone who will be a user for what you’re making and go talk with them, try to understand them from a functional perspective, but also an emotional perspective, why are they doing things, what goes through their heads, what motivates them, what are common roadblocks. And beyond your end user, understand your stakeholders, the people that you are working with. How do they think? How does their perspective differ from yours? And how can you meet them where they are at? And last, Get involved in the process early and often. For the makers out there, take part in the early conversations as much as you can. The expertise that you can bring to those discussions can ensure that what you are asked to work on later is achievable and will deliver what it is being designed to do. And as a positive by-product, those early meetings can help you get to know the people that you are working with better. Win-win. Well, that’s about it. Thank you everyone for being such a great audience. And please find either of us if you have any questions, comments, or just want to chat. Thanks!