If you are only using eLearning inside your organization - for employee training, compliance training, etc., you may be missing out on a valuable revenue generation resource.

In a Brandon Hall 2004 independent research study, organizations who used eLearning for sales training showed an increase in sales by 30% and a Return on Investment (ROI) of up to 100%.

If eLearning is this successful for sales training, how can you use it to attract and retain customers? By using your eLearning outside your organization, you can not only improve sales, but also acquire new and better educated customers.

Sales training model

Traditionally, sales training has been used only to assist the sale. Certainly, training is a proven way to help sales become educated on your products, industry topics and sales strategies. But the sales person is still responsible for retaining, filtering, retrieving and applying this information in the appropriate context. In today's rapidly changing world, this can be a challenge.

Customer acquisition model

How can you use eLearning to more effectively support the sale and acquire new customers? Let's use a pharmaceutical company as an example. In the customer acquisition model, eLearning is used inside and outside the organization, from sales training to sales performance support to customer training. The customer acquisition model leverages eLearning and applies the technology across all three facets of the sales process. The model involves three steps:

• Assist the sale - one-to-one targeted prescriptive eLearning for sales training
  
• Involve the sale - just-in-time learning approaches & performance support tools
  
• Inform the sale - highly targeted end-user learning for customers: physicians and their patients

Assist the sale

Suppose an organization releases a new product related to oncology. It's critical that the sales force is aware of the product and that they understand when and how to offer it to which doctors.

First off, the product affects only one division and a specific segment of that division's sales force. Since they are the one who will be selling the product, you need to target the learning to that audience.

To speed development, your training staff creates the product training as a series of short, eLearning modules, using templates and standardized development tools such as Microsoft PowerPoint. This learning template approach enables your in-house trainers to focus less on technology and more on content, instructional design and rapid production and distribution.

To effectively assist the sale, the modules are exported to a variety of portable formats, including web, CD-ROM, MP3 audio files, and mobile learning that can be taken on a cell phone or portable device.

The modules are published to an eLearning portal, and the assigned sales representatives are automatically alerted on the new product training. They then access the portal and take the modules, at their convenience. This approach creates a more targeted, highly personalized, one-to-one training plan, based on user profiles.

Using a targeted learning portal, the training is targeted, relevant and available when sales needs it.

Involve the sale

ELearning offers the convenience and standardized delivery that gives learners access to content, anytime. But with mobile connectivity and portability, eLearning now becomes performance support, as well.

During a five-minute sales call, the physician has questions on the new product. Is it right for her patients? Here, our sales rep Gloria uses her WAP-enabled cell phone to access the training modules and quickly search and retrieve details to answer the doctor's questions, right in the office.

Inform the Sale

The final step in the customer acquisition model shares the eLearning with the appropriate customers and prospective customers. When the company's training staff produced the sales training, they also created an edited version of the assigned modules suitable for the end-user, the patient, in this example. These eLearning tutorials are tagged as "customer friendly resources." They are also assigned to the most appropriate learner profiles, such as oncology, obstetrics, etc.

Since these modules were developed by the training staff as subsets of the original eLearning content, they provide a consistent follow-up message for a doctor and a resource she can use for her patients.

Here's how it works. On her way back to the office, Gloria stops off for coffee. Using the wireless connection, she accesses her eLearning portal, remotely.

Gloria follows-up from this morning's office visit by assigning the "customer friendly" modules to an eLearning portal branded for Dr. Harris’ practice.

By noon, Dr. Harris receives an e-mail from Gloria, thanking her for her time and providing a link to the tailored eLearning site, providing more information on the product they were discussing this morning.

Dr. Harris follows the link and takes the module, which answers her remaining questions. She can also forward the link on to her patients.

Power of the customer acquisition model

Typically, we've reserved eLearning for inside the organization. But the customer acquisition model leverages your eLearning technology investment to benefit both the organization and the customer.

Your sales force benefits from more tailored just-in-time learning, along with corresponding performance support tools.

By offering eLearning to your customer's customers, you can increase the odds of acquiring new customers, while helping educate and retain your existing customers, as well.

Contact me, if you are interested in more information on how to implement this model in your organization. Knowledge Direct has all these features built-in to the portal, so you can start gaining more customers and better serving the ones you already have.

Just got back from DevLearn08 in San Jose, California. The conference was really well-attended. I brought back some great ideas, met some new people and gained some insight into the science of play.

Moneytopia - An Immersive Learning Simulation

We presented a session called "Immersive Learning Simulations," and it seemed to be a big success. We showed "Moneytopia - the Big Dream," an immersive learning simulation we produced for FINRA. The personal finance game was modeled after the Sims and the Game of Life. Players choose an avatar to play in the game, choose their friends who will provide advice along the way, then outfit their world in the Dream Machine. The Dream Machine is this big vending machine in the sky, where players can purchase their home, car, furniture, TV, PC, as well as their "Big Dream." Time is accelerated in the game, so if the player lives beyond his/her means, the Repo Man cometh and taketh everything away. If the player runs out of money and out of time, they lose the game. But stay on budget and on track for retirement and they win their Big Dream and the game.

Ruining People's Lives at DemoFest

The game was selected for this year's DemoFest, and I had a blast ruining people's lives. DevLearn attendees would unwittingly wander by Table 5, and I'd set them up in the game. First they'd pick an avatar with a modest $30,000 annual income, and then I'd take them through the Dream Machine. We'd choose the mansion to live in, the expensive Italian sports car, the fancy bling, and before you knew it, they were thrown out Moneytopia. It was great fun. How often do you get to make all those bad decisions?

And I think that's the fun of an immersive learning simulation. You can learn a lot by losing, big. It was interesting too when we'd play another round, those same players would instinctively be more cautious about their purchases, checking their finances, reviewing the tutorials, blah, blah, blah. That made it a little less fun for me, but I wonder if that meant that the game made a bit of an impact. Will those players think twice before buying the 60" Flat panel I picked out for them? It's hard to tell. The problem with game-based learning, and any kind of learning program, is that it's difficult to measure long-term behavior change, and since that's what really matters, we constantly need to seek out research.

Sample Design Documents for Immersive Learning Simulations

Since designing immersive learning simulations is so different than designing traditional elearning, I've uploaded a couple of documents to help instructional designers create game design documents and instructional design documents. Feel free to use these and tailor them to your projects.

Team Training - a perfect fit for Co-Op Play

So we've made some projections of what the future might hold for e-Learning. This is a posting on what we can do today to implement some game-play features into eLearning, specifically focusing on 'cooperative play' or co-op. The military has actually been using co-op 'play' for years, but now we're at a place where we can perhaps take this technique out of the multi-million dollar simulator and onto the web.

Video-based Co-Op - where it began

Years ago, I worked on a project for the Army, where special forces teams practiced resolving hostage situations using a full video-based simulation. The environment included video sequences where the "bad guys" would emerge from doorways or from behind crates in a warehouse environment. I think there was a James Bond film that was something like this (Life imitates Art.) When the mission starts, the team has to take cover, separate and shoot at the virtual "bad guys" in a team environment. The computer system tracked the shots fired to assess how well the team performed.

Co-Op in the game world

In the game world, co-op play enables players on a team to cooperatively compete for a common goal, which makes this type of gameplay a perfect fit for immersive game-based learning. A good example of the power of co-op gameplay is Valve’s Half-Life series; in the two-player co-op mode, players must decipher puzzles and problems while a split-screen allows them to be in two different areas of the game world at once. The two players cannot advance or learn anything new in the game unless the two of them work together.

Imagine this in the context of e-Learning. Groups of learners or students could log into the same game world or environment, and their mutual cooperation determines their success. One set of players could be assigned a certain task and a time in which to complete it, while another set has to solve a puzzle to gain more information or unlock a vital area. Thus, by doing and learning together, the group as a whole can increase its knowledge and skills.

As e-Learning continues to evolve, co-op gameplay will almost certainly grow more popular, particularly as developers create game worlds which can host thousands or even millions of players, such as the wildly popular World of Warcraft. Next post, I'll talk a little about how to use the concept of Clans or Guilds in learning.

So, today I was interviewed by Training magazine for the October issue, which will be featuring game-based learning. To prepare for the interview, I started listing some predictions I have for the future of eLearning and game-based learning, based on the current trends.

From what I've learned from my pals over at Electronic Arts, you need to announce a new release with a bullet list of your five top "features" for the game. So here's my features list for what's coming soon in elearning and game-based learning:

1. Cooperative play -- One of the most popular features that I've seen in commercial games is cooperative play. This feature enables players on a team to cooperatively compete for a common goal. We designed this feature into a game design we pitched to Cisco, called the "Network Assault" game. It's a perfect example of immersive game-based learning. The game is a "capture the flag" mod to the Unreal Tournament PC game. The "Capture the Flag" style game involves teams attacking another's flag, while simultaneously protecting their own. The cooperative play means that teams need to delegate tasks, searching the level for network patches, firewalls, etc, so they can defend their network, while also seeking viruses and trojans to assault the opponent's network. This not only builds teamwork but reinforces the principles of good network design.



2. Clans or Guilds -- World of Warcraft is arguably one of the most popular online games. One reason it is so addictive is that you join guilds and clans, and these online families tend to rely on you. There's a real sense of community and connection, along with prestige when your guild performs well. Sound familiar? Isn't this what we've always tried to promote in a classroom environment? I predict that eLearning will include more of these components. Imagine an online simulation where players are grouped into teams or clans. They have a common mission -- launch a new product line for a fictional brand or retail chain. The missions simulate real world situations, where success depends on meeting deadlines and delegating tasks to certain team members. The feature could work both synchronously (using game engines like Unreal) or asynchronously, where players work on the level individually, then save their game to a Shared Flash object file, so that a team leader or other team members can contribute later.



3. Holodeck -- Remember the Star Trek episodes where Picard ran a war game simulation to find solutions to those unwinnable situations with the Romulans? Did you ever hear Picard or the crew refer to that as a "game" or "training?" It was living virtually, rehearsing possible solutions and seeing the consequences. Sound familiar? Isn't that what good user-centric learning should do? The military has been doing this type of simulation for years, but now that the technology has become more commercialized, I think we'll see "holodeck" in a box, sold as a peripheral to your PC. Now that the Wii has untethered us from the mouse and keyboard, I predict that we'll soon be interacting in virtual space.



4. "4-D" models -- Fine, so we have our holodeck in a box, but who's inside this virtual world? In Second Life, other players inhabit the world. This is fine for entertainment, but for training, we need to make sure that there is efficacy. We can probably extend the Heisenberg Principal to also guess that people don't react online as they would in the real world. So developers, instructional designers and behavioral psychologists will begin developing and marketing "4-D" consumer models. Based on your targeted demographic/psychographic segment, you could "purchase" 4-D models who will inhabit your Holodeck simulations. This way, your sales force can explore a virtual sales floor and interact with people modeled to respond realistically. These “4-D� models could be downloaded and integrated into a variety of simulation games, so that sale training could become sales practice.



5. Modding and user-generated content -- So you have your Holodeck environment and now you have a library of 4-D personas to interact with. So what's the storyline? Here's where instructional designers, writers and producers will be able to create situations and events. I predict authoring tools that will enable designers to use a simple dashboard to tweak and refine the algorithms, so that they can constantly refine and create new situations and explore "what if" scenarios. This type of control will allow organizations to tailor their immersive learning simulations, encouraging creative solutions to tricky situations -- like Captain Picard. And as in the holodeck, by providing variability in the situation, environment and personas, we can truly create a virtual world and revolutionize how we learn to live in it.

Game-based learning? If some of these predictions come to pass, this will be serious technology and have serious implications on how we learn. By then, I don't think anyone will be referring to any of this as merely a game.

The most common question we hear related to game-based learning is... does it really work? And that's a question that has been difficult to answer using actual research... until now. Last week, the University of Central Florida releases a new study that shows math scores increasing when presented using game-based learning.

Up to now, most of us assumed as much. It seems pretty obvious that it's more enjoyable to play a game than to sit through a class. And we can probably safely assume that since it is more interactive, it might be more readily applied.

Last week, the University of Central Florida released a new study that seems to provides some qualitative evidence that game-based learning is more effective than more traditional teaching methods.

The study was conducted with 193 high school math students over the course of 18 weeks. The students were split into two groups: those who played the interactive math videogame as part of their coursework, and those who did not. The game itself contained traditional videogame elements such as 3-D graphics, sound, animation, and an immersive storyline.

The results indicated a significant difference:

• Students in the test group, which played the videogame as part of their learning, showed an 8.07 point increase in their math scores.
  
• Students in the control group, which did not play the videogame, showed a 3.74 point increase in their math scores.

Just as significantly, both the students and teachers felt that the videogame component truly made a difference not just in how the students learned the material, but also in how much they wanted to learn it. Students remarked that the videogame elements made the learning fun, while teachers noted that having math concepts in a videogame enabled many students to conquer a phobia of math.

This is only one study, and it is far from definitive, but it is some good science to support what most of us have known.

If anyone knows of other studies supporting or dispelling the use of game-based learning, please let me know.

I was manning the Digitec booth at the Society of Pharma and Bio-Tech Trainer's (SPBT) Conference in Orlando last week and had the opportunity to sit in on an excellent session by Doug Stevenson on Story Theatre. Being a theatre guy, his booth caught my eye, and I ducked into his session. He has a really interesting approach to creating dramatic and memorable learning. While his session was directed more to trainers and stand-up instruction, I think eLearning designers can apply these nine steps to create really effective eLearning.

Doug reinforced, though, that you need to choose a story with one very specific educational point in mind. We've all sat in on classroom training, and probably suffered through long-winded stories that didn't seem to have a point. Doug's advice is to make sure that your stories have a single focused point. Next, a good story will be personal, and it is set at a moment of crisis. Visualize a crisis you faced in the past, one that illustrates some instructional point. Okay, got a story? Now, follow these steps to make it memorable:

1. Set the scene. Establish a sense of place and dig deep for the details to bring that scene to life. Establish the exact time, specifics on the place, the emotion. Now, paint that picture. Use video, audio, whatever, but use details.
   
   
2. Focus on a main character. The most memorable stories I've ever heard were confessional. Think about how powerful it is to confess your own personal blunder. But they don't have to be personal to be memorable. Your story should focus on a main character facing a crisis.
   
   
3. Begin the journey. Here, you want to focus on action. What is the main character doing, specifically when the crisis occurs? Action is the heart of drama, so choose a story where the main character is doing something meaningful.
   
   
4. Encounter the obstacle. This should be the climax of the story. Who does the main character confront? What happens? Doug acted out the scene onstage, which worked really effectively. For eLearning, consider using video with professional onscreen talent to achieve this. I know it's expensive, but you get what you pay for, and the minute your audience sees Joan from HR trying to act, you'll lose the suspension of disbelief that a story conveys.
   
   
5. Overcome the obstacle. While Doug didn't suggest this, an eLearning technique to acheive this may be to leave the story hanging at that crisis. Then you can introduce your instruction while you've got the learner's attention. Hopefully, you've established a sense of urgency and anticipation that will keep them engaged. You can then come back to the crisis to look at how the main character dealt with the obstacle. Here's where incorporating short video segments into your eLearning will help convey the story more effectively than words.
   
   
6. Resolve the story. Pretty obvious, here. Remember, use poetic license as necessary to make sure the resolution reinforces your one single point. Lie, whenever necessary. Remember Blanche DuBois' famous line in Tennessee Williams' Streetcar Named Desire: "I don't tell truths. I tell what ought to be truth."
   
   
7. Make the point. Doug describes this as "sticking the landing." Like a gymnast doing a dismount, make your point, then salute. Don't ramble or stumble. For eLearning, make sure this point is made clearly. Doug's suggestion was to even frame the message with: "What that experience taught me was...." This approach ensures clarity of message, and I completely agree.
   
   
8. Ask the question. Here, you are trying to evoke personal reflection. Has this ever happened to you? The irony is that a story is really memorable when it's personal and universal. The learner must relate! For eLearning, consider posting the question to a forum. I've been pleasantly surprised at how strong the responses are, and it creates a great sense of community among the learners, too.
   
   
9. Restate the point. Pretty obvious. It's that "rule of three" I learned writing for theatre. If you want the audience to remember something, you need to mention it three times.
   

So those are the 9 steps. My thanks to Doug Stevenson for this session. While attendance at the conference was disappointingly low, this session made the event worthwhile.

Dick Hofmann at Digitec found this link off YouTube, and it's so apt, based on what I heard at the eLearning Guild conference earlier this month, and what I see teaching my college students.

This is a challenge we all need to meet... and we're running out of time.

Next Gen Learning video