LEARNING FROM GAMES - OOPS, MY LEARNER FAILED AGAIN

In one of the episodes of the famous American sitcom The Big Bang Theory, Sheldon Cooper recalls a quote from Albert Einstein - "Einstein defined insanity as doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results."

I've been playing this game called "Archero" multiple times every day. I am that kind of gamer who if gets stuck on a particular level, would probably try a couple more times and then give up. But this game made me go back to those same levels again and helped me beat them. How did that happen? Because I don't go back every time with the same abilities. I am a better warrior each time I jump back into a level that I earlier failed in. 

What they do is, every time I play the game, they provide me with experience points that convert into new abilities that will help me beat the level easily the next time I come back, thereby helping me progress with my abilities and not using a “skip level” button.

This got me thinking about the retry-quiz button in our courses. When someone fails a quiz, we allow them to retry the quiz once again which is just about sending them back to the first question once again, and letting them try answering with nothing changed. What happens if they fail once again? We ask them to revisit the module/course and come back to the quiz. 

What would you do if they’re still not able to pass? What if the information you provided isn’t adequate for him/her to answer the quiz. What would you do? Make the questions easier? Pick the statements right from the middle of the module and pose them as questions? Is that the right way to go? I’ve seen people note down question statements on a notepad and then go back searching for it in the course when they fail a quiz. Aren’t we supposed to test their understanding of the subject, but not just how good their memory is??

This calls for more dynamic instructional methods. I think it is justified for us to accept that our course is not the ultimate source for learning the subject and there could be more that learners might need, to understand the subject at an implementation level. When I say dynamic methods, I’m not asking you to go for complex branching scenarios or game-based learning. A simple change to one of our current practices could help fix this to an extent. I’m talking about the last page of our courses. I think RESOURCES deserve a better place and placement in the course than being laid out on the last page. Maybe along with having them at the end, also add additional reading material for important slides, which could be displayed when the learner fails the quiz and returns to the content. Maybe more examples, additional reading material to understand the subject. This new information (abilities in our game) might help them succeed in the quiz. 

What if it still doesn’t happen? Well, let’s go back to the game to understand how to deal with this. One good thing about gaming studios is they always are in touch with their players through forums/social media and collect feedback to better their experience. We tell them if a boss in the game is too hard to beat with the resources they gave us or if a particular ability isn’t performing the way it should. Sometimes, just the analytics tells them where we’re not able to perform. I’d apply something similar here. Give your learners a chance to write to you in case they figure out if the information provided isn’t adequate. On the other, we could go through the analytics on the LMS to see if there’s a pattern if most of them are not able to answer questions related to one particular topic in the course. If they are, the problem could be at our end. We could provide additional learning on the topic or try to make the current one more instructionally sound.

What other little changes you could think of doing to your eLearning courses without having to cross the budgets to save your learner from failing the course? Leave your ideas in the comments, please.

Happy eLearning!