Short Sims: The Easiest Path to Experiential Learning
episode
#IDIODC Instructional Designers In Offices Drinking Coffee
43 min
1 speaker
8 chapters
transcribed 1 month ago
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Why do traditional e‑learning methods fail to change behavior?
Thank you.
Well, hello folks, and welcome to Instructional Designers in Offices, drinking coffee, drinking tea, drinking hot cocoa. We're just glad that you brought your mug to here to join us here today. As always, Instructional Designers in Offices Drinking Coffee is sponsored by the team here at Domino, helping L&D teams develop, scale, and deliver learning that maximizes employee value. Been doing that for a long time here. Today, gang, a special guest, Clark Aldrich. Clark, you've been with us before, but there might be folks in the crowd who haven't met you yet. So yeah, introduce yourself to the folks joining us here today. My
name is Clark Aldrich, and I work really hard on trying to figure out how to do experiential learning. And so almost for 30 years, I've been trying to figure out why can't schools teach leadership? And if not, how do we teach experiential learning? And so it's taken me down all kinds of paths, but including down the short-term path.
One of the things that we find over and over in many of our conversations, a running thread about the nature of the content that we have to make as learning and development teams. Someone gives us a bunch of information and we have to try to somehow push that into the brain of our audience. And it's very easy to forget that our job really is to change behavior. We're either to improve somebody's performance, help them do something better or something differently or something new, extending that into what they actually do day to day in the workplace. but tell me why just giving people a bunch of pdfs with some information first off doesn't quite doesn't quite meet that mark what's your thought on that
We have all these linear content models and we know they don't work. I mean, you know, we sit and we look at a PowerPoint slide or we, you know, we read a PDF that's written, you know, in a sort of traditional data dump analysis way and it, you know, it doesn't change behavior. And we know that, I mean, we can study it and we can look at it, but it just, it absolutely falls flat. I think all the workbooks, essays, lectures, tests, all of our kind of old methods, I think are kind of falling by the wayside as sort of being inefficient.
You mean the 10-question quiz at the end of a half-an-hour course doesn't demonstrate that someone has learned, let alone can apply something on the job? How can that be? That's what we do. Exactly. And it
can if you do it really, really carefully. But most of the time, we don't even research for actions. We tend to research for a broad analysis kind of thing. I spend enough time as a Gartner analyst that I'm as guilty as anyone, and
that's my
first instinct as well. It's just a bad methodology and we just all kind of have to abandon it as much as possible and just say, okay, workbooks, essays, lectures, tests, let's move away from them for a bit and let's really dive into some other methodologies, including short sims too. And just almost nothing more than just change our research process. I mean, let alone change what we actually produce, but how we interview and what we look for when we interview is a whole different thing.
I was thinking the conference that we were just at, the Canadian eLearning Conference, and one of the other folks that we were standing next to, I was having a chat with them and they had built a new system and they had built it around the research that had been done and really two key principles, space learning and experiential learning, the actual simulations and doing. things there. I think that it's rare that I've run into somebody who didn't believe that doing it or practicing it, have a simulation of it wasn't a better experience. There's all sorts of reasons that they come up with why not to do that. And I guess I was kind of curious for you, since this is something that actually is supported by research and people are remembering it and believe that it's good because we know just because it's supported by research, people are like, yeah,
Like space learning, for whatever reason, that hasn't picked up as much as it should probably get research on it.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
Why do traditional e‑learning methods fail to change behavior?
0:05–6:12
2
What are Short Sims and how do they differ from regular simulations?
6:12–11:43
3
How does AI accelerate the creation of Short Sims?
11:43–16:50
4
What is the step‑by‑step process for designing a 10‑minute Short Sim?
16:50–21:46
5
Can you give a concrete example of a Short Sim for bank robbery training?
21:46–26:56
6
How can organizations measure the performance impact of Short Sims?
26:56–32:38
7
What are the biggest pitfalls for first‑time Short Sim designers?
32:38–38:00
8
Why should L&D teams embrace experiential learning over content dumps?
38:00–42:08