Why (and how) you should incorporate badging into your eLearning strategy

Remember the participation badge you got for showing up to your grade 9 track and field competition? This isn’t that.

I’m talking about acknowledging the mastery of knowledge and skill sets to encourage iterative and deep learning. Done properly, badging can recognize the internally motivated among us.

But I don’t want to dismiss my (and your potential) initial resistance to badging because I believe it helps us better focus on the success criteria for valuable badges. Badging meets resistance because those of us who got participation badges considered them utterly worthless and we did so precisely because they were issued to anyone who managed to just show up for the race. To participants who trained for the day and genuinely competed, the badge was insulting and demotivating. Done hastily or half-heartedly, badges can discourage learning. To be effective, badges must:

• Be issued selectively, probably on the basis of some pre-established criteria,
• Be issued by a credible person or institution and
• Be publishable (or displayable) in a place that is meaningful to the recipient.

Effective badging requires planning and preparation in both the design and build (development) phases of your eLearning project.

Designing badges

As any member of the scouting movement will tell you, participants are required to complete a tasks and then present evidence before being they are awarded merit badges. Badges in eLearning should mirror this structure. If you have established performance outcomes and rubrics (your learner success criteria), you’re on the road to badging.

However, if you only have a fuzzy idea of what the performance outcomes should be, then you need to invest more time in the planning and design phases of your project to establish these criteria before you are ready to leap into the world of badges. An eLearning vendor can help you identify performance outcomes and map them to a learning strategy so that your badges are relevant. Already have those success criteria defined? Beware of badging overkill. Don’t apply badging for mandatory content as it defeats the motivational purpose of badging and rapidly diminishes their stock.

For badges to be valuable to learners, they must have a compounding effect. A single badge tells something of a learner’s interests and skills, but an amalgam of badges tells a fuller, interwoven and altogether more interesting story about their interests and abilities. Its this prospect of telling the fuller story that motivates learners to seek out, accumulate and display badges for professional development. (More on displaying badges in the section below.) Done properly, badging should be integrated into your eLearning strategy.

Building badges

At their heart, badges are images with metadata; metadata are what distinguish a meaningless participation badge from a sought-after badge for professional development. Badge metadata contains information on the evidence of a learner’s concept mastery, the validity of the issuer, the duration of the badge’s validity and any other vital information the issuer wishes to communicate.

On the subject of the duration of a badge’s validity, setting time limits (or expiry dates) on badges makes perfect sense as most knowledge and skill sets require maintenance to remain current. Once expired, badges shouldn’t disappear. After all, the currency your skill and knowledge set is not the same as not having that skill or knowledge set. Your badge’s metadata will determine its credibility, so consider this issue with care.

Because badges need to be published in a place that is valuable to the learner, they must be platform agnostic. In other words, just as learners have the freedom to accumulate (or to elect to not accumulate) whatever badges they want in whichever order they choose, so too should they have the freedom to decide where and when to make those badges visible. If you’re delivering your learning via LMS, find out if your LMS supports badges and if they can be exported from your LMS to be published on other platforms such as LinkedIn.

Getting started

Properly planned for, designed and delivered, badging can support learning in the modern world by providing relevant, flexible, interesting and valuable methods of credentialing. So how do you get started? I firmly believe that experience is the key to relevant instructional design and development. You can’t design and build badges without first experimenting with them as a learner. Go out and earn some badges!

SCORM: Clients want it. Vendors can provide it. What is it?

SCORM is a set of standards which allow eLearning content and LMSs to cooperate.

Most RFPs specify that SCORM compliance is obligatory. But what is it and how does it impact an eLearning project? SCORM or Sharable Content Object Reference Model is a set of standards to ensure interoperability, reusability and communication between eLearning content and Learning Management Systems (LMSs). Instructional designers should have a basic understanding of what SCORM is and how it could impact designs.

But first thing’s first: What does SCORM actually do?

Interoperability

With so many authoring tools and component parts, there are many ways to develop eLearning content. What if you designed an amazing library of eLearning content only to find that it didn’t cooperate with your new LMS? SCORM ensures that eLearning content and Learning Management Systems seamlessly coordinate, or are interoperable. This means that regardless how your eLearning content is authored, if it is SCORM compliant it will work the same on any LMS.

Reusability

Now imagine that you are responsible for providing training to five distinct sets of learners. Let’s also imagine that you have eLearning content – say an activity – that would be valuable to three of those five sets of learners. It would make your life infinitely simpler if you could make that activity available to those three sets of learners only. SCORM enables the reusability of eLearning content such as your activity. This means that it can be removed from the original module and reused in another for different groups of learners.

Communication

Now let’s say that the activity you just shared with those three sets of learners is only truly critical to one set, while for the other two the activity is a nice but not critical addition. Because you’re responsible for ensuring the training sticks, you want to know who among that one set of learners has completed the critical activity. SCORM enables communication between eLearning content and your LMS. This means that when learners in that one set complete the activity, that information is communicated to the LMS and is thereby made visible to you.

Impact to project

Most rapid development tools produce SCORM compliant solutions in a reasonably pain-free way and all LMSs are now SCORM compliant. The biggest impact to projects, from my perspective, is how to optimize SCORM.

Taking the bigger picture of your eLearning content into account is critical if you’re considering reusability of those Sharable Content Objects (the SCO of SCORM). The bigger picture involves understanding the learning objects you have, how they might be reused and who might gain value from them. This is a curriculum- and program-wide view that is directed by learner needs and would be considerably expedited though the use of a viable content management strategy involving curricular evaluation targeting performance gaps. But Instructional Designers will caution you that reusing learning objects (like that activity for your three sets of learners) introduces the risk of confusing or disengaging the learner because activities and content must be relevant and are therefore often context-bound if they are to be meaningful and helpful.

Then there’s the issue of the communication of learner progress. Many clients want insight into learner progress and so will ask for all learning objects to be SCORM wrapped. An eLearning consultant will ask about the feasibility of actually using that information in a meaningful way. Visibility can be a good thing, if you have the resources to make use of that information by, for example, offering coaching or supplementary learning opportunities to those who disengage or underperform. But visibility becomes a millstone around the necks of overworked administrators who have to juggle the competing priorities of administering, evaluating and maintaining learning programs. An eLearning consultant will be considering your human capital alongside your need for visibility.

For more information on SCORM, I encourage you to read, To SCORM or Not to SCORM by my colleague, Julio Ordonez.

ADDRESSING RESISTANCE TO ELEARNING

SMEs and facilitators may resist eLearning. How are you addressing this?

If you’re expanding your learning strategy to include eLearning, you might be encountering resistance from your facilitators and Subject Matter Experts (SMEs). It’s important to understand the nature of the resistance so you can better address their underlying concerns.

Reluctant facilitators: Facilitators play a critical part in eLearning, in particular in the flipped and blended modes of delivery. Facilitators might be concerned that the inclusion of eLearning will increase their workload or radically change its nature. What supports or compensation strategies do you have in place to upskill facilitators in need and to compensate those who knock it out of the ballpark?

Resistant SMEs: Bringing knowledge and focus, Subject Matter Experts are the backbone of eLearning content; but their time is valuable. Are they actually resourced to develop eLearning curriculum or is your project piled on top of their daily responsibilities? Understanding how they are resourced will give you insight into your ability (or inability) to gain their buy-in.

Your approach to eLearning should include strong project management, focused meetings and a robust communication strategy. Your eLearning vendor should be able to help you generate stakeholder buy-in, explain the pedagogical value of new approaches, and manage project timelines and deliverables.

KNOW YOUR LEARNER

If you’re unable to differentiate your learners from the crowd, you’re disconnected from them.

You have the performance objectives, you have a plan, you even have the content, but what do you actually know about your learner? What are you assuming you know? The clearer your view of the learner, the more relevant your learning solution will be and the more proactive you can be at anticipating learner needs and removing obstacles.

Here are some questions to help you get a handle on who your learner really is:

• What is their motivation for learning? With compliance training, for example, learners are required to sit through learning. This yields expected results. Knowing what compels learners to take training will help sharpen the focus of that training and may point to obstacles to motivation which you can investigate and address.
• What is their experience with learning? If your learners have been subject to hours of painfully boring eLearning, odds are they will avoid your course, no matter how masterfully designed. Similarly, if learners have had to sit through hours of disorganized in-class training, they’re unlikely to be eagerly awaiting your session, despite your ability to engage and inspire. Badly designed and executed learning is a reality that all learning professionals have to overcome. Our challenge is to find ways to secure and build on our learner’s trust.
• Are they supported? On-the-job knowledge and skills transfer doesn’t magically happen; OTJ transfer must be designed, monitored and maintained. To change a workplace through learning, you must have a firm understanding of the OTJ transfer plan and how your solution fits within that plan.

What do I do with this information now?

If you are unable to differentiate your learner from the crowd, you are disconnected from them. As a result, you can only guess at their needs, motivations and the barriers they may be facing. This produces learning solutions that alienate learners and fail to meet organizational objectives. More than designing and delivering targeted and engaging learning solutions, we must identify barriers to learning and remove them when we can.

BRANCHING SCENARIO BASICS

To be effective, branching scenarios must mirror real-life scenarios, decisions and consequences.

Branching scenarios are a fantastic way to support deep learning through problem-solving opportunities that mirror real-life. The bad news is that they are time-intensive to create and supremely frustrating to revise, especially if you’ve jumped the gun and built them using rapid development tools before you’ve ironed out the structure and details. It’s worth your while to get it right the first time.

Are they even appropriate?

Yes, branching scenarios enliven otherwise dull content by adding problems, decisions and consequences as you’d find in real-life. However, as attractive as the pay-off might be, branching scenarios are not always appropriate. Have a high need for linearity? Branching scenarios are off the table. Unable to work with SMEs to create authentic problems, decisions and consequences? Give branching scenarios a pass. Tight timelines or conservative review panel accustomed to tell-and-test training? Branching scenarios might not be for you.

They are, however, viable options when the goals of your training are to support decision-making and critical thinking skills, and they’re especially effective if the stakes are high in real-life. For this you need the freedom to break from the tell-and-test approach, and the time, budget and buy-in to generate genuine scenarios, choices and consequences.

The structure

Branching scenarios have three essential components: a foundational problem that’s true to life, realistic decisions and consequences. For a branching scenario to succeed (more on success measures below), they must be realistic. Remember that in real-life, consequences compound; this is colloquially called the domino effect. The principle of the domino effect is that one decision can set off a chain of events with compounding effects. For a branching scenario to be effective, decisions must domino.

That said, consequences must ring true to real-life so that your solution resonates with the learner. Branching scenarios with disproportionate consequences can discourage learners and cause them to check out or blankly click through to bring and end to a frustrating experience. Alternatively, learners will quickly lose patience with branching scenarios featuring consequences that are inappropriately light.

What success looks like

Branching scenarios are intended to peek curiosity, engage a learner’s desire to experiment and inspire them to think deeply about the problem at hand. There’s no better way to kill curiosity and internal motivation than to give a learner a pass-fail grade or provide them with generic and fundamentally meaningless feedback. Or, worse yet, to present them with the mere semblance of choice. Consider providing feedback that explains why one approach is preferable to another, or why one decision might result in an undesirable consequence. Enable them to think differently about their choices. Construct decision paths with unique consequences. Provide learners with opportunities to right their course or start anew. The ability to try again is the defining feature of branching scenarios and the goal of feedback should be to enable learners to make better choices when they start over. Branching scenarios are successful when learners want to explore new decision paths.

Reducing the pain points

And yet, the pain points of designing and building branching scenarios are well-known and can discourage instructional designers and other learning professionals. This doesn’t have to happen. Consider the following methods to reduce the pain so you can focus your energies effectively:

Go old skool: Map out the decision paths using old fashioned pen (or pencil) and paper, explicitly identifying the problems, choices and consequences at every step. Determine how many layers of decisions and consequences will comprise your scenario. Decide how your scenario will end.

Don’t rush: Rapid development tools are fantastic assets but utterly useless if you haven’t defined your decision path. Building out your branching scenario prior to that absolutely essential step will surely cost you much valuable time not to mention many bitter tears.

Reality check: At every stage ask yourself or your SMEs if the scenario still rings true to life. This test extends beyond the problem, decisions and consequences to the dialogue (if applicable) and graphics. If it’s not genuine, it’s not useful.

If the branching scenario is designed properly, learners will want to try again. That should be the goal of any learning experience.

WHAT GAME-BASED LEARNING AND GAMIFICATION CAN (AND CAN’T) DO

Games and gamification are not magic bullets.

Lumos Labs, the maker of a suite of so-called brain-training games called Luminosity, has recently been ordered by the Federal Trade Commission (U.S.A.) to pay $2 million in damages. The reason? Lumos Labs’ aggressive marketing strategy is built around the false claim that its games promote brain health and can reduce or delay the impact of brain diseases such as dementia. There is no valid or reliable evidence – qualitative or quantitative – to support the claim that Luminosity causes improved brain health. And anecdotes, as compelling as they may be in advertising, are not evidence.

So what can game-based learning and gamification actually do?

Multitasking

There is some evidence to support the claim that gaming may improve our ability to multitask.

Researchers at the University of California, San Francisco have studied the cognitive ability of older adults, aged 60 – 85, as they complete sessions in a driving simulator called NeuroRacer. The complexity of the simulation increases as gameplay continues thus forcing players to multitask the more they play. The study has demonstrated that with practice, players can improve their ability to multitask and the effects can be felt in subsequent NeuroRacer sessions months after game-play.

It is unclear if these skills can be transferred to the real world.

Strategizing

A European study of 152 participants (of which 80 were female, 72 were male and the average age was 14) found a “robust positive association” between gameplay and physiological changes in the brain – these changes are related to higher-order activities such as decision-making, prioritizing and strategizing.

What does this mean? We may be able to leverage games and game elements to promote the development of complex decision-making processes that involve sorting through and prioritizing mass amounts of information.

Focus

Flying in the face of popular and often vocal alarm about video games and shrinking attention spans, a Bristol University study used neuroimaging to see gaming brains at work and found they remained focused throughout gameplay. How did they do this? Researchers had participants study in the conventional way (reading notes and reviewing sample questions) while viewing their brain activity. Then they had participants complete a gamified, competitive study session while viewing brain activity as before. The result? Learners were much more focused when study was gamified.

Implications for adult learning

So what does all this mean for Instructional Design and adult learning?

Do, not tell: Science does support the claim that we retain information better if we’re able to apply it immediately. Games and gamified learning, if designed well, can provide learners with genuine opportunities for application and feedback that would support the retention of new information and set learners up for knowledge transfer.

Remember your audience: Digital natives are, obviously, more familiar with games and game elements than those of us who were introduced to digital life via the Commodore 64 or the Atari. Using games and game elements for digital natives means you can streamline or dispense with cumbersome text-based instructions.

Design a fun experience: Learning solutions that incorporate game elements or adopt the game form should be fun. And if the learning is fun, odds are, you’ll find higher engagement, retention and completion rates. Capture and interpret the data and share the results.

If Luminosity has taught us anything, it’s that we must learn to be critical of grand claims about the effects of games on the brain. Yet despite the abundance of misinformation about the cognitive effects of gaming, it’s clear that games and game elements can be used to support learning. They’re powerful tools, not magic bullets.

GAME-BASED LEARNING VERSUS GAMIFICATION

Game-based learning and gamification don’t have to be tech-intensive.

Game-based learning and gamification are terms that are frequently used interchangeably so there’s little wonder that there seems to be confusion in the learning world about both, not to mention how to leverage them to build innovative and engaging learning.

So what’s the difference between game-based learning and gamification?

Game-based learning

Game-based learning is just that: Learning through games. These are fully-formed games, not game elements as you’ll see with gamification below. In other words, the game is the engine, or method of delivery for the learning. This is a great option for content that requires a high level of interactivity and can be shaped into a strong narrative structure.

Game-based learning can be linear or non-linear, tech-intensive or simple. What remains constant across all game-based learning solutions is its high dependence on learner activity and engagement.

What does game-based learning look like? I am eagerly awaiting the release of No Man’s Sky, a fully immersive simulated universe that encourages deep learning through experimentation and exploration. For a more linear example, Typing for the Dead teaches keyboarding skills so you can key your way to zombie annihilation.

Gamification

Learning is gamified when game elements are adopted to heighten learner engagement and build genuine interest in the content. Elements that encourage competition between learners (think of leader boards, trophies and badges), heighten curiosity and buy-in (locked and unlocked levels or hidden worlds), or encourage autonomy (exploration and non-linearity) are all game elements that can be adopted to gamify learning.

Despite common misconceptions, there are no technological requirements to gamification. Remember when your teacher put a gold star by your name when you got the highest grade on that quiz? That was gamification and it wasn’t tech-intensive!

What does gamification look like? Duolingo is my current favorite example. With badging, progress bars, opportunities for application, assessment and feedback, the learner establishes a solid foundation in a new language in ways that are challenging and fun.

Next steps

Inspired to adopt game elements in your next eLearning project? Or are you considering building an entire game to support it? Both game-based learning and gamification are fantastic ways to enliven your course and inspire your learners.

MITIGATING RISK IN YOUR ELEARNING PROJECT: WHAT TO EXPECT FROM YOUR VENDOR

eLearning projects are comprised of so many moving parts, that must work seamlessly together. This necessary complexity, when done properly, results in a single, rewarding and memorable eLearning experience. It’s this complexity, however, that presents risks to projects. Some risks are unforeseen and others you can plan for. Your vendor should have strategies in place to navigate around or reduce the impact of both kinds of risk.

Communication strategy

Your vendor should be proactively developing communications strategies.

What does your review process involve? How many people are brought to the table? In what capacity? How many organizational layers deep? Who should be brought in on an as-needed basis and who needs regular input into the project?

Your vendor should be digging into these details and proposing regular meetings to review the health of your eLearning project. Regular meetings to review project health, different from the meetings to work out project details, are crucial to identifying risks and they should be on your vendor’s radar from day one. A vendor who cannot – or worse yet, doesn’t realise they need to – communicate project level issues as they arise is not an accountable vendor. Conversely, it’s a great sign if they’re taking the initiative to develop a communication strategy and identify what accountability looks like to you.

Solutions-oriented

What processes and resources does your vendor have in place to ensure that they’re always solutions-oriented?

Perhaps your expectations have shifted in the course of the project, or a key SME is suddenly unavailable, or your vendor misses a deliverable. Whether the result of human error or the unforeseen, blow-ups happen. Your vendor should be focused on resolving all issues, from minor to major. They might not come to the table with a fully-formed solution, but they should always come with a strategy for achieving one.

So you need to know how capable your vendor is at identifying, assessing, monitoring and prioritizing risks, as well as planning for and implementing mitigation strategies. For example, do they have processes for quality control and assurance? Do they have sufficient internal resources for your project or do they rely on subcontracting supporting talent? It’s well within your rights to ask them for details.

It’s your project

You feel the pressure to deliver your eLearning project because, let’s face it, it’s your project! You deliver it to your people, after all. Your eLearning vendor should be partnering with you to mitigate risks to your project. If they’re not you should run, not walk away!