A story based or scenario-based approach to teaching this concept can help learners immerse themselves into the course better. The learnability and memorability quotient of the course increases.
Scenarios are situations which the learners can relate to. As per the Keller’s ARCS model, a course is instructionally sound if it has the factor called as relevancy. The R in ARCS stands for relevant and this is what learning designers need to keep in mind. If the scenarios that are used in the course are not relevant to the concept being taught or a real-life situation that the learner cannot relate to, then the scenario is not effective in driving home the key learning.
Real-life examples and scenarios that are relatable go a long way in making the courses more engaging for the learners.
You can include real-life examples and scenarios in your eLearning courses that challenge the learners to apply what they have learned so far, in a realistic professional context. The scenarios could be on selling a product or service, a customer service scenario, a frontline office scenario, etc. Scenarios help learners to apply their knowledge in a real professional environment.
Good stories even if told with simple graphics or animation can be a far better engagement tool than say a complex gamification strategy especially when you are looking to quickly deploy a course and at a reasonable cost. Even in popular games such as Assassins Creed or Age of Empires, stories are used to arouse the interest of the players.
Scenarios enhance the interactivity of your eLearning courses by creating and providing experiential learning for the learners. Organizations should invest in scenario based learning as it leads to better recall and understanding of the key concepts. Scenario based learning is relatable and leads to better learning outcomes.
There are several key benefits of scenario based training.
At Tesseract Learning, we use scenarios to build powerful and memorable courses. Our Instructional designers constantly look at ways in making courses engaging and meaningful. We use a variety of techniques, storytelling being one of them. We find story-based or scenario-based approach to be quite universal, though we need strong support from the SME’s to help blend the story with the main content
We use LXD or learning experience design in a way that the courses that we build are useful and meaningful to our audiences.