No matter what the subject is, having those so-called «Aha!» moments is definitely one of the most satisfying experiences you can live as a learner. You know, those moments when you suddenly understand a memorable truth.
After all, as a training manager, this is what you aim for: You want your attendees to improve their skills on a certain area, by providing them pedagogical content, whether physical or digital. In this regards, a training simulation can be the way to go.
In this article, you will discover how to create a training simulation that brings you results, using the authoring tool ITyStudio to illustrate our examples.
How To Create An Efficient Training Simulation With ITyStudio
With more than 10 years spent designing eLearning modules, we can affirm that the most appropriate method to create those «Aha!» moments is developing a training simulation.
For instance, in a training simulation where your learners act as corporate managers, they might unexpectedly realize that the best way to keep power over others is not to be authoritative, but instead to listen and include their team directly into the decision making process of the organization.
There are some skills that can only be learnt by doing, and analyzing how people react to our actions. Managing people is one of them.
This phenomenon, when coupled with other strengths of a training simulation, can enable learners to get a deep understanding of the most abstract training concepts.
Nevertheless, once again, training simulations are often misunderstood.
A lot of training managers make critical mistakes that completely break their training modules, leading to poor results as well as unsatisfied trainers, leaving everybody kind of frustrated.
In this article, we are going to give you some tips, in order to design an effective and engaging training simulation.
1. Know your audience.
To create an effective training simulation, the first thing you need to do is to define your audience.
In other words: Be aware of their knowledge, skills and expertise levels.
The point is, if you do not clearly define what skills they currently master, what they already know and what they need to go to the next level, then you will have a hard time developing an online training simulation that will have a real added value for them.
The last thing you want to see happening is wasting your hard-earned money and precious time basing your training simulation strategy on assumptions. Your training simulation will be pointless, because you will not have the right pedagogical approach for the particular people attending your training.
Consequently, to increase your audience’s professional knowledge base, you must evaluate them. This is the first step you need to take to develop an engaging training simulation.
The cool thing is that, with ITyStudio, this stage can be completed easily. As you can see on the screenshots below, you can set up criteria of analysis for your learners:
Moreover, based on these criteria and your attendee’s answers, a pedagogical radar is automatically delivered:
2. Grab your learners’ attention.
A best practice consists in creating an eye-catching title and introduction for your training simulation. Besides, one of your best allies as an attention grabber will be humor.
In a serious enterprise environment, using small pieces of humor here and there is proven to be a great pedagogical tool, and it will make your training simulation engaging. Be careful though, do not overuse it.
Otherwise, your learners might not stay focused, thus failing to absorb the most important details of the training simulation. It is important to provide them with a clear framework that brings their attention on your key pedagogical concepts.
By highlighting these key points, you will enable your learners to focus on what is really important from the very beginning. A good way to do it is, for instance, to insert a PDF file or a video within the training simulation, and ITyStudio makes it easy.
3. Establish a solid pedagogical structure for your training simulation.
Once you catch your learners’ attention, you now have to settle your pedagogical approach. In other words, you have to think about what you want them to learn. Based on our experience at ITyStudio, we can give you two pieces of valuable advice in this regard:
- Get realistic expectations concerning the outcome of your training simulation.
- Do not flood your audience with content.
The bottom line is that you have to put yourself into the attendee’s shoes. Think about that. It is impossible –and painful– to absorb too much information, in a limited period of time.
Thus, you have to create what we call a «brain friendly» training simulation, in which you divide a large volume of pedagogical content into key sections.
This is a step by step approach. Indeed, the more clearly structured you training simulation will be, the easier it will be for employees to retain it.
For instance, what we did with ITyStudio for one of our customer is dividing his training simulation into three areas. Each area being linked with a key section of the course.
4. Stimulate attendees’ emotions.
It is proven that including emotional elements will greatly impact the efficiency of your training simulation, as well as your audience’s engagement. That is the reason why you need to design it in a way that your content triggers emotional responses.
Actually, it is all about following an emotionally-driven approach. We highly encourage you to use scenarios and storytelling to do so. Fortunately, this is the secret weapon of ITyStudio!
Thanks to its branching scenarios feature, the only limit is your imagination. Judge it by yourself:
5. Put interactivity to your training simulation.
Stimulating your learner’s emotions is a good starting point, but you can go further: Put interactivity to your training simulation. Forget the old fashioned «info screens», and focus on creating series of activities that entertain attendees instead.
For example, you can add games, videos, pictures… Any kind of interactive elements that could enable your learners to practice useful operating procedures. By putting in place engaging content, your audience will be more likely to retain what they are learning.
ITyStudio has been created with interactivity in mind. In the video below, you will have a practical example on how to setup interactivity between characters:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7YrSMAVQHeI
6. Show to your learners how the training simulation could be useful in the real world.
This last tip might be the most important of all. Because knowledge is nothing without action, you have to give your learners the opportunity to use the concepts taught in the training simulation.
Give them the chance to make choices, and to see themselves in scenarios where there are real world benefits. The main idea here is that, by encouraging employees to use the pedagogical content they received in a real world framework, they will be able to realize how their specific skills can be applied in their daily situations.
With ITyStudio, you can easily allow your learners to make decisions, and put them in a real world framework, thanks to your branching scenario.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Npyc2-wbRIg
Now, It’s Time To Take Action: Create Your First Training Simulation For Free!
Hopefully, this article gave you an insight on how to create an engaging training on your own, using the authoring tool ITyStudio as an example.
As you have seen, you will not get overwhelmed by all the technical stuff, as everything related to web design is already done for you, and the pedagogical structure can be easily laid out through right click and / or the drag and drop system.
The most beautiful part is the outcome: Learners do love interactivity, and you will be able to offer them plenty of it.
Moreover, you will see that your pedagogical results will be better as well.
Ready to go to the next level? Give it a try! Start your 30 day free trial here!
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