‘All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.’ What happens when Jack grows up? Does reaching adulthood mean that Jack will no longer ‘play’? It certainly seems that way, doesn’t it? Case in point – corporate training. Our approach towards corporate L&D is very different from the unstructured, almost subconscious way in which children learn through play. It doesn't follow the rules of pedagogy; rather it is based on the principles of andragogy or adult learning where every learning activity is carefully designed to achieve a specific learning goal and ultimately a business goal. Corporate training is ‘utility-driven’, ‘straightforward’, ‘targeted’, and any other adjective that you can throw in that can make it more clinical. There's nothing wrong with that, except it takes all the fun out of learning.
A recent research report suggests 43% of employees are either indifferent or dissatisfied with current training. That's worrying considering the effort, time, and training dollars that go into corporate training. So maybe it's time to bend these closely guarded rules of adult learning a little and give employees a chance to have fun during training. Because the fact is, the urge towards 'play' and its benefits don't just disappear as soon as we become adults. Even if we are now engaged in different ways, a lot of learning and exploration still comes from things that we do for the sheer fun of it.
So let’s make that attempt. Today’s blog is not about methods, strategies, tools, and solutions; it’s about opening a door to discuss the possibility of bringing ‘play’ back into learning.
- The Power of Unpredictability
Unpredictability doesn’t hold a very positive connotation in the corporate world. But it is the unpredictability that makes learning feel like solving an unresolved mystery for children. “What’s it going to be today, a routine lesson, an activity, a day trip to the local museum, a surprise test?” We don’t have that in corporate training, do we? Learners are either scheduled for a classroom session or assigned a course – and there are only a few ways that would unfold – they get to click some buttons, watch some videos, answer some questions, and it’s all over until the next time.
Bringing play into learning will reignite this sense of unpredictability and intrigue in learners. If you manage to break the cycle of predictability even for a second, you'll see learning truly take effect and corporate training no longer being mundane.
Creating an Unpredictable Learning Path with Branching Scenarios
Bringing unpredictability to classroom training is not that difficult. It depends on the instructor, and any unplanned activity during the session will do the trick. But it becomes a bit more challenging if you want to surprise your learners during an eLearning course. The best way to make that happen is through branching scenarios.
Simply put, branching scenarios are much like ‘choose your own ending’ stories. The learner is given a choice at each step and based on what they choose, a unique path opens to take them forward. There is no right or wrong answer; the response of learners in a branching scenario is situational and based on their response, they can either resolve it or make it more complicated.
Click here to play a branching scenario designed for soft-skill training by Gavin Inglis.
How many pathways a branching scenario has depends entirely on your instructional designers. It can be 5, 10, or 30 based on how many different possibilities they can think of. But if you want to give learners a truly unpredictable learning pathway, combine adaptive learning with branching scenarios.
- The Thrill of a Challenge
There is a curious dilemma that most instructional designers face while planning and designing learning content for corporate training. Should the content be easy or difficult? And to be honest, easy wins every time. That’s because we believe learners will get demotivated if fail at something. It is a genuine concern, but it’s also true that ‘easy learning’ is boring and sometimes, failure challenges the learner to do better, to prove something
A challenge, by definition, is difficult, frustrating, and not easily solved, but that is part of the fun. I mean, we never stop playing a game when our character dies, do we? Instead, we immediately hit replay to prove that we can overcome the challenge and reach the next level.
So, a challenge has its quota of fun and a positive effect on learning. We may forget all the questions we got correct but we'll always remember the one we got wrong. Don’t worry that your learners will fail and get demotivated. Rather, every obstacle they cross will give them a sense of achievement, and every failure will give them the drive to do better.
The Challenge of Making Corporate Training Challenging
I know what has been doing the rounds in your minds ever since I started talking about play in learning, especially now that I have mentioned ‘challenge’ – games. It is true though; game-based designs embody the spirit of both play and challenge in eLearning. Game-based eLearning encourages learners to solve problems, exercise their imagination, execute strategies, play as characters, and win the challenge, thereby making the most boring learning topics infinitely more interesting.
Here is a game-based eLearning course on preventing food-safety hazards. Click here to see the demo.
Perhaps the best way of using games to pose a challenge in an eLearning course is to use them as an assessment strategy. Here is an eLearning assessment designed using a game-based strategy to measure customer-service skills. Click here to see the demo.
Games are in no way limited only to eLearning courses. In virtual classroom sessions also, you can use virtual whiteboards for annotation where you randomly assign learners a task or a question and they have to type in or draw their response on the whiteboard to be seen by everyone. You can even make a Pictionary game through it.
- Playing with Peers
Do you know what's the most remarkable part of playing? It's its ability to bring people together. Play is not an isolated event; neither is learning. We play with someone, against someone, for someone. Bringing play into corporate training will also be a social activity that promotes collaborative learning.
That can be done either by inciting a sense of competition or by assigning learners a group task. This fun space with peers will expose learners to different thoughts, opinions, ideas, and perspectives. And if you could find the right blend of peer collaboration and play, you can make the learning experience infinitely more effective and memorable.
You can engage learners in role-playing exercises in classroom sessions, and assign group activities using breakout rooms in virtual classrooms. And in eLearning, you can make use of internal discussion boards and chatrooms within an LMS. But there is a very important phenomenon that has completely transformed how we socialize and exchange ideas. And that is Social Media.
Harnessing Power of Social Media for Social Learning
Social media had had a bad reputation in corporate L&D circles for a long time. In the beginning, it was considered too informal, too loose, and too unstructured for corporate training. Resisting it didn’t do us any good though. While we were vigorously trying to maintain the sanctity of formal corporate training, social media was making information accessible, fun, and relevant for learners, gradually becoming the main source of informal learning.
Here’s how harnessing the power of social media (instead of resisting it) worked wonders for Cisco.
In 2008, looking at the success of social media platforms like Facebook, Cisco launched an internal online platform called ‘Cisco Learning Network’ for training and certification as well as a community for networking professionals to interact and share ideas. Later they opened the platform for external memberships as well.
Cisco Learning Network today plays an important role in helping to bring together networking professionals across the world to a single platform, not only to train them, but also to exchange ideas and information on how to design, build, and manage more complex networks. The platform allows learners to share videos, tutorials, study guides, and games, and create virtual events. Today it has more than 2 million members.
End Note
There is one rule for learning through play – that is there is no one steady rule. There is no one way you can bring play into learning. If you want to include play in your corporate training strategy, you've to figure out a way that best suits you. It's not going to be easy; you'll need careful planning and a lot of questions and challenges to implement it. But it's worth taking a chance, isn't it? Maybe down the path, you will see corporate employees getting their curiosity back for knowledge and finding joy in learning once again.