I have this mental block sometimes… when I think of ‘corporate training’ I use one part of my brain, when I think of educational games for kids, I use another. It could be that I was partially lobotomized at birth (I’m kidding.. who would write such a horrible thing!) or it could be the odd but persistent weight of client expectations of how one type of project should look depending on the target audience.

Is it a given that kids can only be entertained with excitement, clever puzzles and captivating characters? Or maybe it’s that adult training happens to land more around the area of “here’s how to refinance your home using our 15 step mortgage calculator”. The following projects are made for kids, but more often these days we’re looking to get creative characters, engaging environments and unified (short & to the point) goals that are memorable and have long lasting educational value into adult training.

This first piece is the NCFL (National Center for Family Literacy) “Literacy House”. I had the pleasure of working with a great idea of theirs, and helped turn it into a living breathing experience with a variety of illustrations, photos and multiple voice overs. I got to bring in my 2 year old daughter Elena into the project (that’s her voice you can hear throughout) while I played the role of daddy (how fitting!).

Users can explore a house and simply roll over and click different areas of interest to learn about various ways you can incorporate literacy into every day of your child’s life. Rarely do I find a project I can bring into my own personal life, but this one honestly works with kids – there are a ton of ideas and suggestions throughout, so take a look!

Our other two project launches (both with NCFL and Smithsonian) are the “How would you feel” Greensboro Sit Ins simulation, which teaches the user about various perspectives of a variety of people throughout a sit in. And finally the Find  a Flag is more along the lines of where’s waldo for U.S. flags – explore the environment to discover fun facts about the U.S. flag, and if you find them all you get a surprise at the end!

 The projects are filed under Educational Games and Basic Simulations in our eLearning portfolio, check them out today!

Edheads.org wins TechColumbus Innovation Award, Executive Director goes full time

On February 4^th, our partner company Edheads.org continued its streak of success by winning the TechColumbus award for Innovation in Non-Profit Service Delivery.  The award was a surprise to Gail Wheatley, Executive Director.  “TechColumbus is known as one of the top 10 innovation incubators in the country, so, while we were hopeful, we certainly didn’t think we had this one locked.  There was a lot of outstanding competition, including the number one science center in the country, COSI, and the number one library system in the country, the Columbus Metropolitan Library,” said Wheatley. 

 Edheads has previously won major national awards such as the Flash Forward Award for Best Educational Content, and the Communication Arts Interactive Design Competition.  Edheads also successfully competed against international competition to win the American Association of Museum’s Gold MUSE Award, in conjunction with COSI, for best science education project.

 Edheads develops online educational games and simulations to help K-12 students understand difficult concepts and explore careers.   Over 12 million people annually (and over 100 million total since 2000) use the free service to learn the role of surgeons, engineers, weather forecasters, or crash scene investigators.  In order to produce the activities, Edheads partners with many organizations, such as Cardinal Orthopedic and Mount Carmel East Hospital, the Ohio State Highway Patrol, the Ohio State University Medical Center and OSU College of Engineering. Partnering organizations help research and test the activities to insure their accuracy.

 In addition to winning the TechColumbus Award, Wheatley will soon be leaving her long-time position as Director of Electronic Education at COSI and will be assuming a full time position with Edheads. “This is the best of all possible worlds for me, says Wheatley.  “I get paid to learn about other people’s careers in ways most people only dream about.  I go into operating rooms and witness brain surgery up close, or I can explore an engineering lab at OSU and find how they create nanoparticles.  Then I get to share all that knowledge with students across the country, hopefully interesting them in science, math, engineering and technology along the way.  And I can’t express how grateful I am that the idea has really taken off and that now I get to do this full time!”

To experience Edheads’ free online games, visit http://www.edheads.org/ to be a surgeon, weather forecaster, crash scene investigator, engineer, and more.

There tends to be a mentality that doing your best is good enough (at least that’s what my mom told me when I got a C average in algebra), but what if your background was in finance, and someone asked you to develop a training course on accrual VS. Cash based accounting? Does it make sense that someone nearly-qualified to be a SME (Subject Matter Expert), is handling instructional design? And further still, does it make sense to give that same person access to a rapid-development platform to build out the actual course?

Many people are great at what they do, but if I’ve learned one thing as a small business owner, it’s when to call it quits. I don’t repair my own car, I hire a mechanic… I don’t clean the office bathroom (oh wait.. yes I do.. bad example)… I don’t do my own taxes, I pay my CPA. Knowing your limitations as a large corporation can be tough. Bureaucracy plays a roll, as does boredom. Sometimes jobs are spread too thin over multiple employees, which is when it’s deemed a good idea to take on the roll as eLearning developer for the day. And of course if your manager/superior orders you to do something, you pretty much have to do it whether you’re qualified or not. The biggest reason I’ve seen that large corporations try and handle eLearning development in house is to save money.

If a contractor cost $2,000 to write a script in three days, which resulted in 85% knowledge retention, focused goals and a memorable experience, how would that equate to an employee costing $178 in hours to develop the same script? Does that employee have the right expertise to laser-target the right action items? Are they more likely to bend under the pressure of upper management to “put that 40 page flow diagram back into the course… now!” Is having 40% knowledge retention worth the time it took to train those employees?

I personally love being on the outside. Although there’s the chance we piss someone off, our honesty is generally accepted and appreciated. We’re more likely to stand up for the integrity of the course content and quality development as our job/employment isn’t at risk (don’t get me wrong, losing a client would suck, but if your goal is to help them succeed, this generally doesn’t happen.)

When a large corporation hires a specialist to handle their training development, they get the immediate benefit of an outsider looking in. I know it’s a lot easier for me to pick out someone else’s flaws than it is to recognize my own, and this directly applies to in-house development VS. hiring a specialized contactor. We can quickly assess the need, propose a plan of action and immediately begin research and development. When you need us, we’re there, when you don’t need us, we go away. No need to become a training business with a five person staff on payroll when your company focus is on parts distribution. Do what you do best, and when you recognize your limitations, hiring out can become a great opportunity for both cost savings and business growth.

When someone mentions the word ‘corporate’ to you, what comes to mind? Vibrant colors, creativity, innovation, daring ingenuity, humor? Chances are, if you’re like me, you’ll think of the color blue, numerous managers, bureaucracy and long revision processes. These aren’t wholly bad things, they just seem to come with the territory. For the most part the training produced by such organizations mimic the same attitude of safe, boring and looooooong paragraphs (sort of like this one) explaining 19 points of interest over each 10 minute slide. I remember a teller at my bank asking me what I do for a living, so I told her we create custom training… She sighed, put her head down and mumbled something under her breath that probably wasn’t pleasant, referring to her own experience. This certainly isn’t the response I’d want. Training should always have the potential to educate, engage and entertain!

Notice how I don’t use names or point fingers here, that’s because I’m not trying to get into trouble… I’d just like to stress that when everyone gets their way, and all voices are heard (in other words, no single individual is in charge) messages blur and focus is lost. The end user, generally the employees or clients of such a company are the victims… told to drudge through countless screens of information no one could ever realistically retain in time for the post test.

The point? Corporate doesn’t have to equal a mind numbing experience, but that sure is a simple statement for what is in reality a very complex environment. Fifteen people all trying to simply get a job done on a tight deadline does not leave room for creativity – the job just has to get done. But chances are you’ll end up with an already dated approach to ‘training’ where little to no education takes place, in other words, a waste of money. But who’s going to care? It’s not their personal money, it’s the corporation’s. Not only that but you’ve been ordered to get that money spent by a specific date or it disappears!

You may be thinking ‘don’t be silly, just take the money and do the job’. But this is my point of view: I’m passionate about bringing a true memorable educational experience to any topic, with any team, on budget and on time. There isn’t a single topic out there that can’t be approached in a creative way given a few days and medium sized budget needed for that training to be a success. Humor costs just as much to write as boring corporate-speak. Memorable photos in off-beat situations cost just as much to purchase as that collage of multi-ethnic business people standing in a line that I see on 50% of all eLearning development company home pages. My biggest suggestion of all would be this: Would you rather have a 100 minute long course where 10% of the training is grudgingly remembered, or a set of ten, 10 minute courses, on topic with memorable interactions and goals where 60% of all information is retained in digestible chunks. It’s like comparing a five hour long staring contest to a slap in the face out of nowhere. One is brief, memorable, and with a little work actually helps your corporation grow and thrive, as opposed to wasting time and money.

If I’ve learned anything over the years, constructive honesty isn’t always appreciated, but it’s definitely the best policy. This is true with my family, my co-workers, my contractors and my clients. We’re all in it together, and if you’re successful, we’re successful.

After a bit of a summer slow down, things are beginning to pick up around here with some of the most exciting projects we’ve seen to date!

On our plate is a little bit of everything from an interactive autopsy (yes.. you’ll get to poke a cadaver), nano-fiber engineering, fire safety and workplace collaboration skills to name a few. If there’s one thing I love about this sort of business, it’s that every new job is so entirely different from the last one – there’s rarely time to get tired of a topic.

As far as time lines are concerned, I have no idea, but everything is in the works. Hopefully by late this year/early next some of these projects will be available online to share.

Earlier this week we wrapped up and launched Edheads Design a Cell Phone activity at www.edheads.org. With the help of Motorola, as well as the Ohio State University College of Engineering we approached the idea of getting girls interested in Engineering careers.

It ends up, boys like to blow things up, build things, work with machines, while girls tend to stay away, but for what reason? The activity uses the idea that we can use design and engineering to help people (in this case senior citizens), not just give them something cool to look at.  In the end with the right product we can better their lives.

Edheads Engineering - Design a Cell Phone

Creating the activity was a short but rewarding process – we created a design application where users can build a near infinite number of different phone styles using our 100% script based phone builder. We had to put the breaks on certain aspects to fit the activity, but overall it’s a very intuitive and rewarding feature which has already been used 97,000 times in the first week since launch (based on our lesson tracking data).

Through the process we worked along side Ohio State, as well as Motorola engineers to create a situation where the user needs to not only research and design, but listen to consumer feedback in order to get the best sales results. If you ignore the research you won’t know what sort of phone to build, and chances of being successful go down quite a bit.

Interview the senior citizens

This is the first non linear activity we’ve built for Edheads, and it’s already proving its educational value based on user testing, critiques and overall response. For some additional information on the launch, check out The Ohio State Engineering news site for a little blurb on the project. Motorola also has a bit of info on their overall educational initiative used to help fund the project at their news site.

Engineering Sales Results

We have many more engineering project topics to explore, it’s just a matter of time and funding – next up starting late July we begin ‘Nanotech’ – something to do with fabrics, but that’s all I can say.

All joking aside, we’ve spent some time redoing our entire portfolio of eLearning, training and educational game samples to show a bigger variety of our work in a more enticing format.

Great creativity and design sells itself, and we excited to show off a set of clear categories, larger visuals to ogle, and many more projects to view.

Be sure to check out the new character design, 3D and illustration sections as well! Although not commonly found services within an eLearning development company, these services are a great addition to any simulation or game and help smack your users in the face with entertaining visuals!

Over the last 11.5 years of developing eLearning for the full range of humans (1st grade on up to corporate and elderly) I’ve gotten to experience a wide variety of situations, scripts, content and end results.

The thing that struck me as odd along the way was how the larger the corporation is, the more project managers they have on board debating the content of a course, the easier things get for the end user. For some reason plot points disappear (too hard to follow), humor is erased and sterilized (you’re going to offend that one person out of 20,000 – so everyone else will have to be bored and disengaged as opposed to entertained with a memorable learning experience) and complexity is added back in (well, if they’re not going to be entertained, we should at least cram in all 75 pages worth of content into that single slide and lock the next button so they don’t have a choice but to read).

I was talking to Matt my developer yesterday, and we agreed that if the user really hates what they’re going through, they’ll find a way to ignore the content, skip the slides and in the end they always have the option of clicking the little X/close button on the browser window. To think that we, as educators, don’t also need to entertain and make it a priority always amazez me. 

When peter Jackson made lord of the rings, his point wasn’t forcing plot retention and memorization of the books, but to slim them down, prioritize entertaining and action packed moments, bring out the true essence and emotion of a broad and lengthy concept – in other words – make it accessible to the general public without them feeling the writer/director was  treating them as brain dead, unable to grasp complex ideas.

I’ve always though an analogy, whether visual or spoken (as a story) goes a long way towards helping the average person understand complex ideas. We use this over and over in our Edheads.org projects – take hard to teach concepts and make the accessible to the average user. We open doors by using a set of hand drawn animated characters, in bright non-intimidating fun environments. Once users feel welcome, they open their minds to the activity and really begin to learn. We ask them questions, suggest open discussions and let them take it from there.

In comparison, corporate level projects tend to use visuals of multi-raced adults standing on white backgrounds, or someone in a cubicle hard at work.. it’s almost too realistic and definitely not a fun and engaging visual to entice your employees. Setting an analogy outdoors, telling a story through a mythical character, using light humor that can’t possibly offend will only make people pay more attention. Once you have their attention, you can begin to layer on the challenges.

When a learner is disengaged, the chances of them wanting to solve a problem are slim.. they might poke around at it but in the end they really don’t care. Entice that same learner into story with mildly dramatic plot points.. you’re saving the company form disaster.. you’re helping people overcome a problem, you’re negotiating a sale with a virtual customer… suddenly there’s another aspect, usually character driven that looks back at the user and spurs them on to conquer the challenge. This is something that no number of multiple choice tests will accomplish.. I can tell you i barely passed my SATs.. got a D- on my algebra exams, and thought overall a C average was great. Now as an adult I use algebra on a daily basis when programming, use problem solving skills and a whole lot of real world experience when building my companies and completing jobs.

In the end, there’s a reason people cringe when they have to sit down in a sound proof room with a camera over their shoulder when taking some eLearning certification test.. it’s not fun and brings back haunting memories of high school. We have the potential to truly teach people these days, sure it might take a little longer to develop and cost a bit more.. but would you rather spend $5,000 on a course that people forget, retaining no information what-so-ever, or spend $12,000 on a course where people spread the word on how fun it was to learn a concept, actually got buzzed about the learning experience and looked forward to the next course. Suddenly you have an engaged employee, open to learning, happy and excited about solving the next challenge that comes their way. Motivation is a powerful tool, it’s just a shame how often the opportunities to motivate are passed up, and in return we can expect some mediocre results.

All I can say is it’s worth it.. the effort, the time, the cost. Look at Brain surgery on Edheads.. One month went by with no marketing, no one forcing anyone to use it, and we’ve had over 1,000,000 unique users, word of mouth and a great response overall. It is possible to create this in the corporate world, it just takes some additional effort.

Well, after 3 months of hard labor we let our baby go off into the world today. Edheads.org has officially launched virtual Deep Brain Stimulation surgery.

Users get to slice, probe, suture and stimulate the ailing patient back to health using actual (by actual I mean virtual) tools with gloved hands and spurting blood effects. We were particularly proud of the blood.

You may find some humor mixed in with over 40 minutes of pure educational interactivity, multiple character designs, numerous environments and some good special effects.

Within 5 hours of launching, and with no media exposure or marketing we have had over 13,000 individual users launch the activity – we keep track of each launch and section through our own back end counters. It’s pretty exciting to see word spread so quickly on a project you’ve poured your company’s efforts into.

So, enough words, go check it out for yourself:

Edheads Virtual Brain Surgery

You can also check out some screenshots in our portfolio.

I’ve had plenty of discussions about Instructional Designers, some of which make them sound like eLearning myth (think Sasquatch), and some with people who thought Instructional Design was one of those terms you throw out to impress clients  (“I thought it just meant someone who could type in Word 97 and use spell check!”).

Over the last two years I’ve had the opportunity to work with three great Instructional designers, and I thought I’d do my part to explain a little more in depth about what they do.

Imagine a client placing a 300 slide printout of a PowerPoint on your desk, topic unknown, turnaround time: 1 week or less, and it all needs to be compressed into a 15 minute eLearning course with a maximum of 5 goals or objectives. This is a great example of what makes a great ID special.

Not only do they have to digest and research the material, they have to fill in the gaps, invent simulations, games and situations that will educate and entertain the user. It’s a high bar to set, so trust me, when you find a good ID you want to keep them forever. 

Like any field, flexibility above all else is very important. If you hire an ID who is set in their ways (and surely they may know what’s best 100% of the time), and they’re unwilling to budge to meet a smaller set of standards (for instance a budget constraint might limit the number of custom interactions in a course), you may have a problem with scope creep. Like with most jobs, knowing the limitations of a project help you set yourself up for success when writing the final storyboard.

With that said, I’d like to shamelessly plug the fact that we handle all sorts of Instructional Design here at Clearly Trained, from sales training, ethics & compliance, to virtual simulations and educational games. We understand there’s a setting for every tone of voice, but insist on adding some humor when possible to our projects (Adults are people, too – and deserve to be entertained!).