RE: thinking
eLearning Development
We LOVE eLearning.
We create training in virtually every delivery medium all the time, but there’s no denying, there’s a special place in our hearts for eLearning. Probably because we see it done wrong so often; it drives our passion to help people do it right.
Think of the last time you finished an eLearning course and said “that was Awesome!” Never happened? Well, it has for us! And since we’re such sharing people, we want others to experience that feeling too.
What You Can Expect
A part of the reason we founded ThinkingKap was to fundamentally change corporate training.
The sad truth is that people have come to expect eLearning to be dry and boring and tedious. Make no mistake: that is actually a big advantage for anyone trying to do something different. A great way to stand out is to create eLearning that is realistic and makes training immediate, applicable, relevant, and if at all possible — FUN.
We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again, there are no boring subjects, just boring instruction. OK, some topics can be kind of boring, but that’s all the more reason to find interesting ways of presenting that information. If eLearning is dull or irrelevant, it’s because something went wrong in the design process. We know from experience, that effective teaching begins with good design. Fun is no accident, it’s a design choice.
One of our older courses on HIPAA Privacy Compliance won an award, in part, due to its story around a “near-fatal nose-picking incident.” That may sound funny, and it is, but we used that example for a reason. This type of thing creates a learning moment that helps your content persist in learners’ memories long after the training ends. Going into the annual compliance courses the following year, employees still remembered the points made around the “nose-picking” story. Humor is a great device for retention and engagement.
The reason we believe in fun eLearning design is that it’s good for our client’s bottom line. Fun learning sticks, dull learning doesn’t. Fun doesn’t necessarily mean funny, it can mean interesting and memorable.
We use learning moments to boost retention and encourage ongoing performance. These are specific experiences in the learning process that have been crafted for retention and memorability.
Fun, memorable training is an investment in your human resources. As always, this fun is backed by that structured approach to design to maximize what can be taken in and retained.
Our Approach
At ThinkingKap, we believe it’s critical to have a plan when you’re designing training.
Our process gets adapted for any training we create, but it was originally designed around the needs of eLearning design and development.
Our seven-step process starts with a discovery phase in which we analyze your needs, define course objectives, and determine the scope of the course. We then take your existing content-which we can supplement with research if necessary—and structure it to fit your learning objectives.
We build, prototype, evaluate, and improve the training until you have a tested, relevant, and contextualized course. Regardless of the style and approach you want your training to take, we design for the highest level of comprehension and application.
Service In Action
One of our clients had the challenge of presenting subtle, real-world issues like cross-cultural interactions to a diverse, international audience. Previous courses were linear and didn’t properly engage learners. They needed an approach that could simulate the social interactions people would experience with individuals from cultures across the globe.
We used Articulate Storyline to build complex scenario-based games from which eLearners could better understand different cultural decision-making processes.Through the upgraded approach, the client’s trainees were able to experience the nuance of cross-cultural interactions in more realistic situations.
These scenarios put learners in the center of interacting with everyday issues from the perspective of diverse cultures, showing them how everyday situations are perceived very differently around the world. This resulted in deeper understanding for all eLearners.
Man, do we feel your pain on this one. But if you can surprise your learners, or make them laugh, you’re guaranteed to get more value for your training dollars, because people tend to remember the course that didn’t put them to sleep!
That said, humor doesn’t fit every corporate culture. Even if you’re not looking to do anything funny with your material, there are still ways to make your content exciting and engaging.
Part of what we do is take a look at the course from a learner’s perspective and find ways to make it as stimulating and exciting as possible. It might be as simple as telling a story, or using an analogy, or an interesting use of animations and movement, or conversational and plain English scripting.
While funny can be good, engaging is what’s truly important.
Just wanted to let you know that we LOVED LOVED LOVED what we saw in the course! …While the tone was light, the message was clear and concise and the user interaction was thought provoking and even a little difficult! You hit it out of the park!! – Six Sigma Yellow Belt Certification
HOW IT WORKS
Our seven-step process starts with a discovery phase in which we analyze your needs.
We then take your existing content and structure it to fit your learning objectives.
We build, prototype, evaluate, and improve the training until you have a tested, relevant, and contextualized course.
