Scenario-go-round

Compliance courses rarely have learners lined up for hours for the opportunity to enroll in them. In most cases, learners take these courses not because they want to, but because they have to. Intrinsic motivation versus external enforcers.

There is information that the company feels is important for the learner to get from the course, so one option may be to provide the content in a linear presentation format. However, because the information does not satisfy an immediate need for the learner, it may be difficult to really learn from it.

An alternative is to present situations where the learner will use the knowledge and skills of the course in real-life scenarios. By getting the learner to think and make decisions will help process the information and integrate it into their knowledge base.

Tom Kuhlmann presents three questions that he asks before building scenarios for training programs.

• What situations require the learner to know this information?
  By putting learners in real-life situations, they will be able to apply it to their work more easily.


• What choices could they be expected to make in that circumstance?
  The choices offered should be real and not so obvious. My making the learner stop and think about their actions, that increases the value of the training. 


• What are the consequences of those choices?
You could provide very concrete feedback statements. Or, you could continue building the scenario on top of the learners' choices. In many situations, there isn't a direct cause-effect relationship, but a domino effect where small deviations can combine into a larger result.