Newsletter: 21 January 2004

Welcome to the Toucan House Online Ed. Updater - 21 January 2004

This occasional newsletter keeps you up to date with innovation and change in online and flexible learning. In this edition:

- Current Toucan House Projects
- Toucan House's Knowledge Sharing Initiatives
- More on Learning Games

Previous updaters are archived at www.toucanhouse.co.nz

Current Toucan House Projects

Happy New Year! This year is off to a great start for Toucan House as we get right into working on a wide assortment of interesting projects. Here are a few of them:

Working with a large training provider to design and build interactive modules for carpentry students. These modules are designed to prepare learners for practical, on-site job skills by making abstract concepts accessible in a virtual environment.
Conducting a training audit and subsequent materials development for an agricultural training entity.
Advising a large, multi-national manufacturing company on their training strategy (both practical and soft skills) and piloting innovative training delivery. The initial process involves using video to document work processes, analysing work stations for all tasks relevant to an employee, conducting interviews, and documenting our analysis.
Conducting learner profile analysis and designing workshops for an innovative business strategy training and consulting organisation.
Designing interactive simulations to assist with problem solving and troubleshooting in the manufacturing industry.
Analysing course learning outcomes to build an overarching skills competency matrix and training delivery strategy for a business skills training establishment.

Toucan House's Knowledge Sharing Initiatives

We have also started some new outreach initiatives in the last couple of months, including a workshops series (http://www.toucanhouse.co.nz/workshops.html) and the Toucan House Knowledge Exchange (http://64.207.153.14/blogs/toucanhouse/index.html) where we continually post articles and links to interesting blended and eLearning resources. The resources are organised around topics such as Educational Design, Strategy, ROI/Measurement, Technologies, Learning Games and more.

The idea behind both the workshops and the Knowledge Exchange is to share the information that we work with on a daily basis with others. We hope that you find them useful and we very much appreciate your contributions.

More on Learning Games

In our last version of the Updater, we discussed how learning games are emerging as a promising platform for motivating learners, particularly younger learners who have grown up in a rich, multimedia world. In this issue, we will discuss some of the issues and challenges associated with creating learning games.

The typical response to a suggestion about creating a learning game is, Oh, but games are so time-consuming and expensive to create! After all, we all know that most video game projects cost millions of dollars (in the U.S., the video game industry makes more money than the movie industry!) and take years to complete. Large projects require animators, programmers, sound effects specialists, musicians, background artists and many other skills. But when we think about what a game really is, we find that there are other ways we can challenge and engage learners, without necessarily going to a lot of expense.

Some organisations have opted for very simple approaches, integrating training content with simple flashcard-type games, using Solitaire or a trivia format. The truth is that learners enjoy these games, particularly learners who grew up with card and trivia games. Admittedly, this sort of simple implementation may not hold the same allure for your typical 3D shooter player, but itšs a start.
But money and time are really not the biggest challenges associated with creating learning games. In his book, Simulations and the Future of Learning, Clark Aldrich explains that one of the biggest issues with converting existing training content to a learning game is that most training is linear whereas games are, by definition, open-ended. The whole idea behind a game is that the player can control the way the game unfolds, as well as the outcome. So creating a learning game often means starting from scratch, developing the learning content with the games platform in mind.

As the title of his book suggests, Aldrich primarily writes about simulations, a category of the video game industry that is quickly emerging as an intriguing approach to e-Learning. In fact, the best-selling game of all time is the Sims, a simulation game where the player gets to raise a sim family, from feeding them and getting them jobs to furnishing their house. It doesnšt take much imagination to think how such a game might be leveraged to teach all sorts of subjects, from sociology to architecture.

Blockbuster games aside, simulations can also be built on a shoestring. For instance, it is not too difficult to build web-based simulations that employ a branching scheme, whereby the learner is presented with a set of options, picks an option, sees the outcome of her decision and has the opportunity to try different approaches until she finds the right one. This is actually quite a powerful learning device, as it places the learning in a real-life context and provides opportunities for both success and failure. Teamed with audio, video and/or animations, these simple simulations can be very engaging learning experiences.
As we mention above, the team at Toucan House is working on a couple of these simulation projects. We'll keep you up-to-date on our progress in a future Updater.