Not familiar with Knowledge Guru? Knowledge Guru is a game engine that lets you create quiz-style games that leverage the principles of repetition and spaced learning to help people learn facts fast – and remember them over time. It’s an ideal tool for reinforcing training that has already been delivered – or for offering content that would be brutal if presented as a set of PowerPoints or Click NEXT to Continue training.

 What We’ll Cover

If you are curious as to how quickly you can put together an engaging game for learners, join us for this Quick Start webinar. Here’s what we’ll share:

• The basics of the tool – how to create a game with up to four topics, learning objectives and questions.
• How to design a game that actually helps people learn (amazing concept, we know!)
• The do’s and don’ts of writing game questions – what question styles most engage people and what kinds of question writing techniques to avoid (like the plague, avoid).
• How to test your game (nothing more embarrassing than launching – and discovering you have a question that reads, “Placeholder text for question here” instead of a bona fide question).
• How to launch a game to your players.
• How to assess player performance – and identify possible areas where they need more help.
• How to encourage spaced learning via the Guru Grab Bag competition.

If you want to dip a toe into game-based learning – and need a tool that can help you rapidly create an engaging, social game – join us. We’ll show you how simply and quickly you can create a compelling learning game that gets measurable results.

You can register for the webinar on the Knowledge Guru website.

So the Knowledge Guru team got to work on Getting the Facts on Game Based Learning, a really cool infographic we put together to educate the Instructional Design community on game based learning. It’s also a great tool for instructional designers to start spreading the word on the efficacy of game based learning and gamification, because the more information there is out there, the more confident clients will be in a game based learning solution.

Click the image below to view the infographic.

And now we’ve finally finished the project. We debuted the infographic on the brand new Learning Game Design Blog. You can view the infographic here.

We’re shaking things up in 2013 here at #TalkTech! Every couple of weeks, a guest curator will be picking our topics and leading the discussion. Not much will change format-wise… we’ll still publish the weekly post here and the topics will still be tweeted by @BLPIndy, but a guest curator (besides yours truly) will pick the topics and be ready to lead the conversation during the chat. This week’s curator is Laura Fletcher, Learning Designer at BLP. If you are interested in being a guest curator for TalkTech, let me know!

How can we use the data collected in learning games?

What are some of the potential pitfalls of using big data in education?

Nowadays, the world socializes, works, plays, learns, and consumes virtually.  All of that activity is being recorded out there in the void, and by tapping into that data, individuals, governments, and corporations can gain insight into nearly all aspects of human behavior. If that sounds like a double-edged sword, you’re right, and we’re only scratching the surface of what we can learn from big data. What are some of the risks you can see to using big data within the education sphere?

Using Big Data to Improve Learning

How can we use the data collected in (learning) games?

In a typical day, online game developer Zynga processes one petabyte of game data, and runs 3,000 reports to optimize and improve their products. (I hear that a petabyte is equivalent to 500 million pages of printed text—serious bathroom reading.) In the case of learning games, how can we apply the power of big data to improve our products as well as the user experience?

Gamification is the friendly scout of big data

What role does self-quantification and big data have in the workplace?

Self-quantification is all about tracking your habits—whether exercise, sleep, nutrition, or other behaviors—with a goal of self-improvement. You’re already participating if you weigh yourself regularly or wear a pedometer. However, the surge of available apps for self-quantification makes this movement a big data goldmine. With people seeing such great results in their personal lives, how can we bring the quantified self (and associated data) into the workplace to improve engagement or performance?

How Companies Use Big Data & The Quantified Self Movement For Insight

If you’re new to Twitter chats, don’t forget about awesome tools such as Tweetchat.com that automatically save the hashtag and help you focus on the conversation!

All About Knowledge Guru™

Learning Game Design Workshop

See you at the conference… or after.

We cannot wait to talk about the power of games to transform learning while visiting Dallas. Whether you are attending the pre-conference workshop or planning to visit us at the expo, we will be happy to share our learning game design stories and research.

We are hosting free webinars on learning game design and Knowledge Guru shortly after ASTD ICE, too. They are perfect for a conference-goer who wants to learn more… or a learning designer looking to gain introductory knowledge about game design. Learn more and register below. Contact us if you would like to schedule a face-to-face meeting at ASTD ICE. A Primer On Play: How to Use Games for Learning (Free Webinar)

How we talk about Agile versus ADDIE

This difference (of early sharing and collaborating) is such a breath of fresh air that some people have even recommended leaving ADDIE in favor of a new, more agile system.

I can see where they are coming from, because newer and more efficient processes have been developed. Agile (and other iterative models like it) take into account new technologies and more rapidly evolving ideas. But I’m not sure if “leaving” is the language we should be using. The concept behind the ADDIE model has worked for instructional designers for years. There is something about the simplicity of it—it grounds the team in stages so you know you’re not designing before you’ve defined the problem, or developing before you’ve laid out your design, etc.

“To me it’s not really versus”

So I would say that Agile isn’t a complete replacement for the ADDIE model. We’re not urging you to pull an “out with the old and in with the new” approach. In fact, you can make the case that in an Agile model you still do all the steps of ADDIE. Why does it have to be a fight between the two?

That’s precisely the point Jennifer Bertram made during my interview with her for these Agile Learning Design blog posts. She’s the resident ‘Agile expert’ here at Bottom-Line Performance and here are some snippets of what she had to say:

So in Agile versus ADDIE, which one wins?

“To me it’s not really versus. I don’t think they’re incompatible or that the science of ADDIE is wrong at all, I just think about when working with other people it requires you to talk about it more frequently—and that’s why you need an Agile process. Our clients really love being part of the team in that design meeting that is deciding what the interactions are and so on. We’re getting to solutions our clients are comfortable with earlier because they were there helping create them. That’s how Agile expands on ADDIE.”

At BLP we primarily use the ADDIE process, but integrate it with Agile. Can you explain when each process makes the most sense?

“If all you want are your traditional words on a screen with a next button, then Agile doesn’t make sense because there’s nothing really to iterate—there’s nothing to prototype, there’s nothing to test—you would still use ADDIE there. The Agile process is about different functionalities and what task we’re having those learners practice.”

We’ve used the Agile process when building Knowledge Guru games, is Agile a good system for developing learning games?

“Agile is really helpful for learning games because there is a lot of functionality to test—there are a lot of moving parts. So you think about when we develop learning games you have the learning goal, the specific challenges you want those learners to complete in the game, how do they win and what’s that system look like—there’s a lot of things that could benefit from the Agile process, the collaboration and iteration.”

ADDIE wasn’t supposed to be so rigidly applied

A lot of the bum rap that ADDIE has gotten recently, the reason that so many are hailing it as “outdated,” comes from that fact that people picture the ADDIE model in a couple different ways. Yes, the original version of ADDIE—the one developed in the 1970′s by Florida State University—is rigid, linear, and completely impractical for us. However, even those who thought it up knew that. Very quickly the model started being revised and adapted for more practical use. The diagram below shows two different diagrams of the “same” ADDIE model. On the left is the very first diagram from Florida State University (1975) and on the right is a version of the model that started becoming popular later on.

You can see how the diagram on the right starts to become a lot more like Agile. The evaluation is more constant and the structure is much less rigid. It is still lacking a system of iterations and rapid prototyping, and it still doesn’t bring the client into the early phases, but it’s much better. It’s so easy to hold the diagram on the left up as a straw man argument for ADDIE.

Semantics aside, we still need to embrace Agile

All that being said, Agile is still the future of instructional design. Rapid prototyping, consulting with the client early on, and the constant collaboration leads to faster, more innovative solutions. Not to mention it saves you so much time and frustration. No more developing a pretty, polished game only to realize the client wants changes or had something come up with their budget. All in all, I think we should avoid talking about ditching ADDIE completely, but we need to start moving on to Agile Learning Design.

We’re shaking things up in 2013 here at #TalkTech! Every couple of weeks, a guest curator will be picking our topics and leading the discussion. Not much will change format-wise… we’ll still publish the weekly post here and the topics will still be tweeted by @BLPIndy, but a guest curator (besides yours truly) will pick the topics and be ready to lead the conversation during the chat. If you are interested in being a guest curator for TalkTech, let me know!

The founder of Buzzfeed had some interesting things to say about personalization in our increasingly social world

Topic #1: Is positivity an added bonus of games? Can they increase interest where other methods have failed?

This article from BBC News shows that a new project has been launched to try and use games to increase people’s interest in environmental issues. “Basically my idea is to take the concepts of gamification and use them in the environmental sector to try and promote greater pro-environment behaviour.” But here’s the really cool twist: One of the reasons they are trying gamification is to combat the overwhelming negativity surrounding environmental activism. Consultant Paula Owen told BBC News that the study’s target audience included people who had not engaged with environmental issues in the past because it had “all been a bit guilt-filled and full of doom and gloom”. Do you think it will work?

Fun and games ‘can save the planet’

Topic #2: Does the fact that content is on a computer screen detract from mobile and eLearning?

There’s definitely a war going on between paper books (and paper book lovers) and eBooks. This has caused a lot of research into the differences between reading text in a physical book and reading it on a screen. This article makes the claim that most screens, e-readers, smartphones and tablets interfere with intuitive navigation of a text and inhibit people from mapping the journey in their minds. Is this something we need to be concerned with as we move forward with eLearning and mobile learning? I think the current approach is to shorten the amount of text when it’s going to be read on a screen, or at least break it up more frequently.

The Difference Between Reading On Paper And Reading On A Screen

Topic #3: How can we (or should we even) implement personalization in gamification or eLearning?

According to this article, part of the solution for the struggling publishing industry is us. More comments, more filtering, more personalization. Could this be helpful in a learning solution? Is there a way to create certain identifiers for each learner and change the course based on them? Well, I’m sure there’s a way that we already know of, there is always a way, but then we have ask another question: would we even want to? All this personalization (the incorporation of social media, the user input and comments) sounds like it might interfere with the learning objectives. What do you think?

The Publishing Industry’s Secret Sauce Is You

If you’re new to Twitter chats, don’t forget about awesome tools such as Tweetchat.com that automatically save the hashtag and help you focus on the conversation!

IT STARTED WITH A PROBLEM

Agile started as a software development process—a reaction to the cumbersome “waterfall” methodology that had been brought over from older manufacturing practices. Early software development companies had no model for their new trade, so they simply borrowed what had been established for years in other industries where products are made.

The problem is that this method is extremely impractical for software development. This is because in order to move to the next stage of development, the stage before it must be 100% complete, perfect, and documented… and that’s just not how software development works. (I’m sure you can already start to see how this applies to learning design).

“Yeah, this just doesn’t work for us.”

The Manifesto for Agile Software Development

By the mid-90s software developers had had enough, and they came up with their own ways of doing things. They created the Scrum and Adaptive Software Development processes along with many others. And in 2001, 17 software developers came together to talk about what they were doing—thus, the Manifesto for Agile Software Development was born.

It defined the Agile development process as an iterative method based on collaboration. Agile would focus on adaptation, evolving development, rapid prototyping, and constant feedback and evaluation.

So What Does This Mean for Me?

I’m sure by now you are eager to find out what this has to do with us, the learning designers. Well I’ll tell you: We are like software developers, our learning solutions are our metaphorical software—and an inflexible approach to ADDIE is our Waterfall.

I will be careful not to make many more comparisons between ADDIE and Waterfall, because while Waterfall was a flawed method from the start, ADDIE has been a successful model for learning designers for years. My point here (the whole reason we are taking time to explain Agile) is that the rigidity of ADDIE is now holding back learning design. It could be costing you time and money, on top of hindering your ability to come to the best learning solution through iterations and refinement.

Let’s make this more real. Here at Bottom-Line Performance we’ve begun to use an Agile learning design process, and we have quite a bit to say about it. As part of this post I interviewed Jennifer Bertram, the Manager of Instructional Design at Bottom-Line Performance, and here’s what she said:

What has the switch to an Agile process done for you and your team?

“[Agile] has allowed our teams to collaborate a lot more between Instructional Designers and Multimedia, and I think we’re creating more innovative solutions and focusing less on dry content and info screens. Our clients have also really enjoyed getting to see things that work much earlier in the process. They also like the flexibility and having more opportunities to provide input.”

What has this upgrade from ADDIE helped you do that you couldn’t do before?

“Well I think that we’re still doing all of the steps of ADDIE… but what it has done is it has given us a better way to move through the phases of ADDIE and keep coming back to them again, mainly the first three—Analysis, Design, and Development—because as you’re creating this design proof you’re certainly in design mode, but you’re also already developing a little bit. Then when you’re thinking about development, when we’re getting to Alpha, we’re already going back and redesigning things.

This way we’re just planning for it so it doesn’t cause so much frustration and anxiety, on both sides really, for the client— if we say “oh, well you didn’t tell us that back then,” but now we’re having a lot more conversations with them about the design—and then for the development side as well.”

What’s something new about Agile that you like?

“More client interactions and more iterations. So now we’re not going away and creating something and saying “what do you think?”—we’re saying together what our ideas are. So we’re getting solutions that our clients are happy with, and we have a more solid foundation early in the process.”

Don’t worry, there’s more! We’ll continue this interview in next week’s post, Agile vs ADDIE: Which Is Better for Learning Design?

So What Is Agile; What’s the Process?

By now we’ve defined Agile learning design as an extremely iterative process. By using collaborative teams (client collaboration included) and constant iterations and feedback, you end up with a faster and more flexible (aka: agile) process that arrives at more innovative solutions. But this is a fairly vague description of Agile, only accounting for the big picture. How does an Agile process actually work? Where does it even differ from ADDIE? Take a look at this flowchart and see for yourself:

Well there you have it, Agile learning design in a nutshell. Something that started with a bunch of software designers coming together to shoot down Waterfall Methodology became the secret to more efficient (and innovative) learning design. Stay tuned for next week’s post on Agile vs ADDIE where we’ll further break down the differences between the two processes and show you when it makes sense to be more Agile.

Learning and Development professionals have been hearing about learning games and game based learning over and over again for a few years now. Game based instructional techniques are growing in popularity, yet many instructional designers lack the skill set to design game based learning. They have not done it before, so they lack clear direction and do not know where to start.

That’s why Sharon Boller, President of BLP, is partnering with Karl Kapp to facilitate Play to Learn, Designing Effective Learning Games. Karl is a professor at Bloomsburg University and his book The Gamification of Learning and Instruction is one of the most highly regarded resources in the field. Karl’s academic background blends well with Sharon’s experiences of implementing game based learning solutions with BLP’s clients.

Game Based Learning Design Skills in High Demand

Game Based Learning is regularly included in today’s corporate training programs… and the demand for learning designers with a game based learning skillset is growing fast. We’ve known this shift is happening, but the growth became even more obvious when the Play to Learn session we are hosting for ASTD ICE quickly reached capacity. We’ve seen attendance rise rapidly for our free game based learning webinar series, too… but it is tough to build a skillset in a one hour online session. The web is full of introductory knowledge, but game based learning design is a skill that takes practice and coaching.

REGISTER FOR THE WORKSHOP

Our Approach to Game Based Learning Design

If you want to design game based learning, you need to play lots of games. If you want your game based learning to be good, you need to be able to mock up a quick and dirty prototype and play test the heck out of it fast. Find problems, refine, and try try again. You’ll do all of that and more in this workshop. The Play to Learn workshop helps you learn the following:

• A six-step process to design a learning game and create a paper prototype.
• How to use a play testing process to do rapid iteration of a game design.
• How to consider various core dynamics and tweak game mechanics to improve the playability and learning efficacy of a game.
• How to sell games to an organization’s stakeholders as an effective option, answering the question “why games?”. All the game design skills in the world can’t help you unless you know how to convince your organization to buy in.

More on sharon Boller and Karl Kapp:

Sharon Boller:		Karl Kapp:
Sharon Boller is president of Bottom-Line Performance, Inc. (BLP), a learning solutions firm she founded in 1995. Sharon has grown BLP from a single-woman sole proprietorship that employed 1 to a $2M company employing 20 team members. Sharon is also the creator of the Knowledge Guru™ brand affiliated with BLP that focuses on game-based learning. She is the lead game designer for its inaugural product, known as Guru Classic, and she is leading the development of a second, more robust offering known as Guru Game Builder that will allow users to create multi-level learning games. Read full bio		Karl M. Kapp, Ed.D., is a scholar, writer and expert on the convergence of learning, technology and business operations. Karl is a professor of instructional technology at Bloomsburg University in Bloomsburg, PA. He teaches graduate level courses including Learning in 3D and Instructional Game Design. Karl has written five books including Learning in 3D and Gadgets, Games and Gizmos for Learning and The Gamification of Learning and Instruction. Read full bio

Event Location

If you want to come to the workshop, you should register soon. Register by June 30th with the promo code EARLYBIRD13 to receive $50 off! We also have special pricing for current BLP clients. Get in touch with someone at BLP to find out more about client pricing.

We’re shaking things up in 2013 here at #TalkTech! Every couple of weeks, a guest curator will be picking our topics and leading the discussion. Not much will change format-wise… we’ll still publish the weekly post here and the topics will still be tweeted by @BLPIndy, but a guest curator (besides yours truly) will pick the topics and be ready to lead the conversation during the chat. This week’s curator is Nick Shelton, Senior Multimedia Developer at BLP. If you are interested in being a guest curator for TalkTech, let me know!

BLP's MultiMedia team is heading to Adobe Max! What trends do you expect to see this year?

Topic #1: Humor is great, but when does it detract from your learning objective?

Two guys walk into a bar, and everyone sits on edge to hear what happens next. While this is an older article, it is pertinent to humor in learning. I like to crack a joke or craft a yarn in anything I present or teach, and I think it helps people remember the content. The books and online courses I’ve learned the most from, had an element of humor, baked in. While sometimes considered a bad idea for learning, I think humor is an as effective means as any to encourage learning, and this article weighs both sides.

How Laughing Leads to Learning

Topic #2: What are the risks and rewards of extending playability with game modes?

It is often communicated that “games are speculative”. One person may like to be timed, another may hate it, some people may like social aspects, some will turn away. Some like to collect badges and medals and high-scores, some could care less. Building a core game, is the difficult part, iterating and adding new functionality off of those existing interactions,  can (sometimes) be simple & create extended playability and/or opportunities for learning.

How to Extend a Game’s Replay Value by Including Different Modes

Topic #3: What tech and design trends do you expect to see at Adobe MAX?

The MMD team @BLPindy are heading out to @adobemax next week, where some of the most cutting edge technology will be on display. The e-learning world frequently seems to be a few years behind the overall tech world, but at Bottom-Line Performance, we strive to bring new tech to clients today, not tomorrow. Here are the 10 most up-to-date reasons why Adobe Max is a good idea. Let’s talk trends we expect to see, or game-changers we’ve already experienced, and share with the participants.

Top 10 reasons to attend Adobe MAX 2013

If you’re new to Twitter chats, don’t forget about awesome tools such as Tweetchat.com that automatically save the hashtag and help you focus on the conversation!

Want a really cool way to get the facts on Game Based Learning? Check out our new Game Based Learning Infographic! We lay out some great examples of the efficacy of game based learning and gamification, all backed by solid research and great case studies. Click Here to view.

“We learn everything that all the other schools learn, we just learn it differently.”

This is a quote from a middle school student at the Quest to Learn School that opened in Fall 2009. It’s one of the intro comments made in a short YouTube video that does a fantastic job of explaining and SHOWING the answer to “Why games as learning and teaching tools?” The video is embedded above.

The entire school is organized around game design. The curriculum uses game concepts – missions, quests, challenges – to help kids learn things such as science, math, and literature.

Katie Salen is the executive director of design at Quest to Learn, teaches game design, and runs a nonprofit institute called the Institute of Play. She says,

“We believe kids can and do learn in different ways – including digital. It’s a school that from the ground up has been designed to leverage the digital lives of kids…. it’s developed a pedagogical approach that leverages game-like learning.”

How so? Every class uses game concepts such as missions, challenges, and quests to allow kids to think about issues and solve complex problems.

Sound fishy? Can kids really learn well from this approach as opposed to say, a more traditional model of a teacher delivering a lecture, assigning reading and perhaps a project where the student writes a paper or prepares a posterboard?

Watch the video and see what you think. One class project focused on Aesop’s Fables. In a traditional class, the students might read several of the fables, talk about them in class, and perhaps write reflection papers on them or create their own modern fable. In Quest to Learn’s class, the kids work as a team to create a 3D game about the fables. They have to design and script the game, render it, and then “virtually” perform a fable in the game. Which approach do you think engages these students more and requires a greater amount of reflective thinking and problem-solving?

Bringing Game Based Learning Into Corporate Training

Now…how does this translate into corporate training? Here’s a few ways that immediately come to mind to me. I offer them all based on experience. I’ve done each of them:

1. Structure an entire learning experience around a goal of designing a game. Give learners the topic, the learning objectives the game has to teach, and the freedom to create a game. Let them build the paper prototypes and have others playtest it. Huge learning comes from figuring out how you’d turn a topic or issue into a game.  We’ve done several learning game design workshops like this; people remain completely immersed in the experience the entire time.
2. Create a multi-level digital game on your topic instead of a “click next” experience. Instead of telling people what they need to know, force them to find it or figure it out if they want to succeed in the game. Make succeeding in the game mirror what it takes to succeed in their jobs; for sales reps, success should mean they meet high sales goals… and so on. In the game, you make the measure of success hitting a targeted sales goal while making complaints and customer dissatisfaction negatively impact points or progress.
3. Design and use a simulation instead of an “interactive discussion.” Forget about presenting the ideal leadership or team member traits/behaviors. Instead, let people rate their perceptions of themselves and then simulate a team experience – complete with personnel, budget, time, and regulatory pressures. I designed a 90-minute simulation that gave participants a HUGE ah-ha moment around the disconnect between their perceptions of how they would behave as a project team and how they actually behaved when time pressures, regulatory pressures, and environmental factors started pressing in around them. The post-simulation discussion was extremely powerful as people had to acknowledge these disconnects. It also gave them a framework for meaningful discussion. So – we didn’t have to completely abandon the idea of an interactive discussion. We simply created an experience that could make the discussion far more meaningful than it otherwise would have been.

workshops on Getting Started With Game Based Learning

I’m partnering with Dr. Karl Kapp, author of The Gamification of Learning and Instruction, to present a one-day workshop on learning game design. It focuses on people who know nothing about game-based learning and want to get started designing it. We start with the basics (questions like “What are games?”) and end with every person participating in the creation of a learning game that we playtest and modify as part of the day. You will walk away with tools you can use. Join us for one of these offerings and start building your learning game design skills.You’ll have a few chances to participate:

• We’re doing this workshop as a pre-conference offering at ASTD ICE on May 18th. Only 3 spots remain. Learn more and register.
• We’re doing this same workshop in downtown Indianapolis on August 28th. Learn more and register.
• Finally, we’re also doing a “mini-version” of the workshop at the Training Magazine Online Learning Conference in September. Registration for the hands-on clinic will be available soon on the Online Learning Conference website. 

Game Based Learning Design: It’s What We Do

Want the heavy design lifting done for you? BLP has developed one game engine already that allows you to create a simple, quiz-based learning game. Called Knowledge Guru, it is an easy way to get started creating a simple game. We launch the Game Creation Wizard tool at ASTD ICE, which will let you create your own games.

We are in the midst of creating a much more ambitious Guru GameBuilder that we plan to have available in January 2014. This tool will allow you to create a complete multi-level game OR to select small “mini-games” that you can embed in other things you do. Here’s a sneak peek – or really just a proof of concept at this point – of a very simple mini-game called Walk the Plank.  A game like this might be used very early in a multi-level play experience to enable the player to score an easy mission win while learning basic terms/definitions associated with a topic. Warning: this is designed for IE9 and above. It doesn’t function in IE8.