5 Ways Behavioral Learning Can Transform Your eLearning Course

5 Ways Behavioral Learning Can Transform Your eLearning Course
Summary: Product knowledge. Sales. Marketing. These are basic skills you always want to assess in your training simulations. However, they do not enable you to understand what is inside your learners’ mind, and how they see the world, their customers, the company. Knowing that about 90% of our choices are made based on emotions, this is an important factor to take into account. Fortunately, behavioral learning could help you understanding these notions.

How Behavioral Learning Can Transform Your eLearning Course

With classical eLearning authoring tools, it is kind of hard to enter into your learners’ mind. However, with the new serious game authoring tools available on the market, it is now possible to do it, by designing well-rounded branching scenarios and evaluation criterias.

That being said, we have to start at the very beginning: what is behavioral learning exactly? Well, behavioral learning is about putting your learners into training environments, and observe how they behave. Based on their choices and behavior, they will get a score and feedback, in order to move forward and acquire new skills. This kind of online training is perfect to assess your learners’ skills when it comes to human related subjects. Sales, for instance. In this field, behavioral learning is the only relevant way to go.

Now that you have a clearer vision on what is behavioral learning about, we are going to share with you 5 ways it can transform your training strategy, taking your learning simulations to a whole new level.

1. Behavioral Learning Enhance Interactivity.

The problem most of our leads are facing before discovering a serious game authoring tool is the lack of interactivity. Indeed, with classical eLearning courses, you can provide your learners with solid and in depth knowledge. But it is not presented in a digest way. Consequently, training managers often suffer from a bad engagement rate of their learners. Nevertheless, behavioral learning could be a life saver here. By implementing it in your serious games and online training in general, your modules’ interactivity will increase drastically.

Think about it. What does a serious game authoring tool need in order to understand how a learner is behaving? Well, the answer is simple: it needs the learner to behave during the training simulation, so that his actions are tracked right into the Learning Management System platform.

In a nutshell, that is what behavioral learning is all about. Learning by behaving. This phenomenon will force your learners to take decisions, and to live an immersive experience within your learning simulation, leading to an overall better engagement rate from them.

2. Learners Can Apply Their Knowledge In A Realistic Situation.

When it comes to online training, there is nothing worse than sharing a lot of valuable content to your learners, without giving them the opportunity to apply it right away. Studies have shown that if you do not apply the knowledge you just acquired within the first week, chances are that your brain will already have forgotten about 70% of the information.

This is exactly what we want to prevent from happening. Otherwise, what would be the point of having a training department in the organization? In the end, you want people to learn, but above all to retain the information you are giving.

Thus, behavioral learning seems more than appropriate to enhance the information retention of your attendees.

behavioral learning

Put your learners in a realistic situation. Make them face a scene they are used to living in their everyday life. Give them choices to make. Sit, and observe from your LMS platform.

If you have done your serious game development properly, learners should have applied and retained the information, leading in a high rate of good answers and results.

Thanks to behavioral learning, employees can now put their knowledge into action, in realistic situations, in order to improve their operational skills. This way, you will reach your pedagogical goals every single time.

behavioral learning

3. Assess Soft Skills.

The great part of behavioral learning is its assessment part. Indeed, you can also evaluate your learners with classical eLearning authoring tools. Nevertheless, you cannot really assess soft skills like empathy, relationship, etc.

Fortunately, there are great serious game authoring tool on the market, such as ITyStudio, that enable you to dig further in the process.

Thanks to its branching scenario feature, you will be able to design quickly and easily realistic scenes followed by choices to make by learners. Depending on their choices, they will be given a different score, as well as a different path.

behavioral learning

In the evaluation part, you will have a clear and accurate visibility on the results of your learners, for every single evaluation criteria setup in the past. For instance, you could have empathy, relationship, humor, etc. This way, behavioral learning enables you to evaluate soft skills of your learners.

behavioral learning

4. Discover A More Human Aspect Of Your Learners.

The most common and classical way of assessing learners’ performance stay the quizz.

However, even if this medium is still good in some way, it presents a lot of drawbacks. The lack of interactivity, of course, and much more. Above all, the major issue is its lack of humanity. It is not really human to check boxes. Even a robot could do it, if setup properly.

With behavioral learning, this is a whole new story. By evaluating the behavior of your learners, you add a human touch to the training simulation. This is the only way to fully understand how your learners are thinking and working inside their mind, broadening your future possibilities of training subjects.

5. Convey Expected Corporate Behaviors Easily.

Depending on the organization you are working with, a corporate religion could be setup, and thus some behaviors are expected.

When it comes to corporate training, it is fairly easy to teach values and technical stuff to your employees. You could just create a well-rounded eLearning course about it, and you would be done.

Nevertheless, it is way more challenging to convey expected corporate behaviors, and to make your learners understand what it is about, as well as how to apply it in their daily work life.

Behavioral learning is great in this regard. Thanks to your branching scenario, you could inspire learners based on the choice you are proposing them. Even if they do not choose the good answer right away, their subconscious mind will remember the different choices at their disposal. Moreover, it is easier to include notions of expected behaviors in your feedback, because your serious game will be behavioral learning oriented.

Ready To Leverage Behavioral Learning In Your Organization? Take Action!

In this article, we shared with you 5 ways behavioral learning can transform your organization, regarding your online training strategy.

If you are interested in this kind of solutions, you should definitely give ITyStudio a try!

This serious games authoring tool contains all the features needed to embrace the advantages listed above.

It is easy to use, it is engaging, and, best of all: you can try it for free!

Ready to go to the next level? Claim your 30-day free trial here.