4 Essential Steps For Developing A Great eLearning Simulation

4 Essential Steps For Developing A Great eLearning Simulation
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Summary: If you want to ensure that your learner successfully transfers theory to practice, an eLearning simulation could be the answer. To develop a relevant, engaging, and worthwhile online experience for your learners, follow these 4 steps.

How To Start Developing A Great eLearning Simulation Or Activity

To make your eLearning simulation as valuable as possible for your learner, work through these 4 steps before you even touch your authoring tool. Go behind the scenes, and see how an example eLearning simulation was built (Video).

1. Plan The Process

First, it’s important that you map out, step-by-step, each stage someone would go through in a real-life situation. This a key part of planning as it’s the process that you are going to need to mirror through the use of your eLearning simulation.

As an example, imagine you need to create a simulation for sales training. The real-life process might look something like this:

1. Plan The Process

 2. Translate The Process Into An Online Experience

Once you know exactly what your learner needs to do and in which order, you can focus on how you’re going to simulate each step in the digital environment. To put this into context, let’s stick with the example of sales training and in particular, outbound calling:

 2. Translate The Process Into An Online Experience

In the example, audio-clips and branching questions are used to simulate calling contacts and to tailor the experience to each learner. The aim of this is to get the team up to speed and confident with some of the challenges they may face in a phone conversation before they have to speak to real prospects.

The opportunity to practice and learn from mistakes in a safe, non-judgmental, and risk-free environment is a great benefit of simulations. This approach could also save a lot of time and resources compared to needing more experienced members of your team to participate in staged role-plays.

3. Provide Feedback

It’s true that an effective way of learning is to make mistakes. However, this is only the case if the mistakes are accompanied by actionable, contextual feedback. It’s important to feature this process within your simulation in order to provide a valuable learning experience.

Ensure that support is available for each step of your simulation so that every potential shortcoming can be set right at the moment.

In the sales example, good decisions are rewarded, and potential fail-points are highlighted.

3. Provide Feedback

4. Add Detail And Check Your Decisions

After you’ve completed steps 1-3, it’s key to add in as much detail to your simulation as possible. Decide on the different interactions that you want to feature within your simulation; possibilities include times, questions, and formats like video and audio.

You should select your interactions based on what will have the greatest impact for your learner. Ask yourself why you should place a video on a particular page, and why you should present a particular piece of content as an audio clip. Your focus for every part of your simulation should be how to help your learner.

Check out this eLearning simulation example.