The best thing, unless you’re an old-fashioned e-learning developer, is that you don’t need old-fashioned e-learning developers. I’m very much a lightweight when it comes to technology matters, but I can use it to produce sophisticated learning games, quickly, cost-effectively and with no assistance from anyone at all.

One of Caspian’s strap-lines is “a game in a week”, so I thought I would give it a go. I got hold of the trial version and in my spare time (and on long conference calls...) produced this 20-25 minute game on one of my specialist subjects: the keys to organisational creativity (you’ll need to download shockwave player from here, and it's best to run it on a PC, not a Mac).

This game has multiple paths, scoring, timing, “sandbox areas”, 3D animation, audio including music and voice, pass/fail systems and so on. I fully acknowledge that there are some bugs with it, and it’s a little rough in some areas but don’t forget I started from scratch. So let’s look at some costs:

• Not including “training time” (self-study), this took 9.5 days to build (so “a game in two weeks”...not one). There was no writing/scripting time because I wrote directly into the tool, so there’s no script. The 9.5 days includes concept design and storyboarding, which was minimal because the tool allows you to prototype, re-try and build iteratively.
• Because organisational creativity is my specialist area, no SME time is included. So let’s add 2 days for that, for a 25 minute piece.
• There is no client management time included, as I didn’t have a client. But this would be minimal, and I certainly wouldn’t need a project manager, because in line with my boutique production model, I don’t use PMs at all. But let’s add a day for that.
• I only used graphics that came with the package. Given that Thinking Worlds uses a proprietary format for its models (output from 3ds Max), this is currently a bit limiting. I understand that a mid-range per hour cost for 3D models is about £5,000 so I’ll add that on. But in future, Caspian will be providing a much larger library of models which will drastically cut asset costs.
• All music, sound effects etc. were from free sources.

So in summary, a per hour cost would be something like:

• Build: £11,400 (assume day rate of £500);
• SME time (£1000; 2 days x £500)
• PM time (£500; 1 day x £500)
• Graphics/models (£5,000)

Total per hour - £17,900

This looks something like a mainstream e-learning agency would charge for conventional, fairly rapid, e-learning based on templates. But what we’re getting here is bespoke, 3D immersive game-based learning. OK – so what I’m producing wouldn’t quite match a console game, but I reckon this is just about ready to break the mould isn’t it? And I know that I, and other Thinking Worlds users, will only get quicker and more expert at this, so the cost can only drop and the sophistication only increase.

"If you set out to win awards you won't have a snowball in hell's chance of doing something that works. And, of yes, you'll be out of a job in six months."

...those of you revelling in the recent (and very enjoyable) e-learning Age awards beware.  

He also talks about slowing down and letting ideas incubate. So...rapid e-learning? Hmmmm.

I also thought I'd throw in one of my favourite observations from Funky Business, which describes responding to client needs as a "driving using your rear-view mirror".

But seriously, the need for creativity in e-learning is a severe challenge for us all. It's damned difficult coming up with new ideas when there's so much time pressure, when our (very understandable)professional and commercial insecurity leads us towards extrinsic motivators (like awards...), and when clients, in their insecurity continually ask us to do the safe thing.

BUT - other, more highly paid, more highly regarded industries manage it. And so should we.

“...it has managed to cut us off from people and things. We can no longer see what we have made or whom we have touched; we frequently can’t stand back...and say “I did that” or “I changed him or her”.

De Botton describes our need to see what we have done; feel our impact on the world.

He’s actually describing large corporations, and in his terms, a typical e-learning agency would be a small business. But in my experience, I think he could equally be talking about many e-learning agencies. What seems to have happened in most, but not all, such agencies, is that during the good times, the attraction of scaling up and industrialising production processes was too great. It didn’t matter that the majority of the people working in such agencies became alienated from their end-users and clients; that they became little whirring cogs in over-complex machines with little notion of what they were attempting to achieve; that they had little sense of responsibility for changing people, and a weak sense of ownership for their contribution to the whole.   

But the bad times are exposing this model as costly and ineffective. Creative, efficient e-learning producers in the future will be made up not of a large number of specialists, most of whom have little contact with clients and users, but of generalists, all of whom have constant contact with users and clients. They will be led by designers and producers, not driven by technologists and project managers. As software rapidizes, the need for highly technically trained staff, and large teams, is reducing fast. I can now produce a high quality, creative e-learning course in a few days, a 3D immersive game in just over a week...as long as we keep the team tiny and use the right tools; as long as I prototype rather than specify; as long as I seek simplicity and nail complexity wherever it arises.

I know that what I produce is good, because I’m in constant contact with clients and users - and they tell me it is. And the best thing is that I don’t feel alienated from the people I’m trying to help, and the people I’m collaborating with. It’s rewarding personally, it’s lucrative and it works.

This article in the Independent suggests that business schools, while not exactly at the forefront of learning technology, are being pragmatic and innovating when they need to. As it says:

"The current generation of college student has never known a time before cell phones and personal computers. They are eager to use technology to enhance their learning."

And there's research to show that students actually learned better using their mobile devices than if they'd sat in a lecture. 

One group attended the live class, the other listened via podcast. When given a test on the subject a week later, the podcast group scored 71 per cent while the in-class group scored 62 per cent. 

The current generation of MBAs from highly regarded business schools like Warwick are likely to be the next generation of senior execs. If they're getting accustomed to "new" learning methods, it can only be a matter of time before they are putting pressure on us to be more innovative. This can only be a good thing, but we'd better be ready...

What really strikes me is that the process is just such damned common sense - albeit very nicely visually articulated. I am asking myself (the webinar is still in progress as I'm writing) why it is necessary to still have this explained to us. But clearly it is necessary when you see most e-learning, overburdened as it is with "stuff" (content). 

There are various reasons why we're overburdened with content, rather than focussing on creating change in people, and these are principally in the areas of SME/client inexperience and inappropriate expectation. Until we overcome these - and Cathy's method is just one tool in our tool-box for this - we'll be stuck where we are. As I've said in various places, clients need educating probably more than learners!

It also occurs to me that this kind of action-focussed approach can only lead towards scenarios/sims/games - or at worst, story-based and case-based "courses". It simply cannot be supported by the current generation of page-based tools and methods...which on the whole is a very good thing. Thanks again Cathy.

For example, I've learned as much about the reality of business decision-making from Dragons Den as I did from my MBA, and my various attempts at property development owe their (admittedly mixed) success to Property Ladder, as to any training I've had or books I've read. Deliberately or not, these TV shows build in many of the "learning functions" and activities that I see so rarely in e-learning, including: paced repetition, goal-setting, emotion, presentation of opposing views, evaluation of options, situation, summaries...and so on. They draw me in and seduce me to be concerned about what's going on, at least for a short while. Above all, they proceed from the specific (the story) to the general (theory), not the other way round. And not an "interaction" in sight. 

Specifically, Design for Life reflects some important facets of design process and thinking that I don't see very often in the e-learning field:

• Design is about getting under the user's skin: in the episode I've linked to, one designer tapes up his eyes and goes for a walk in the middle of Paris so that he can feel what his blind users experience. How often do learning designers even meet their users, let alone try to get a sense of their feelings?
• Design involves bringing who you are to the party; it's about personal expression. It's not an objective, cold science. We know from many design professions that people who express who they are in their work are better designers.
• Design concepts need to be articulated visually. How much text do these designers produce in their presentations? Not much. There are no weighty specification documents, but visual boards and prototypes instead - right from the start.
• Design is about creating experiences, not "content". I've said enough on this elsewhere... 
• Design is a messy, troubled, unpredictable process, not a mechanistic flow of predictable steps.

If we're interested in learning from other design professions (whose members are, on average more highly qualified, better paid and have access to larger budgets than we do), then I suggest Design for Life is a worthwhile piece of CPD.  

Most e-learning production companies appear to have settled into organizing themselves in ways that resemble 19^th or 20^th century industrial production. Learning (instructional) designers write words, graphic artists do the visuals, technical developers build final products, project managers…er…well in theory they’re supposed to tie it all together, (although I do often wonder what value they would be adding if most of the time if the rest of the team would just take responsibility…but enough of that). Roles are clearly separate and do not overlap, (somewhat like a Subway outlet during busy periods).

The evidence from other design and software industries suggests that this isn’t necessarily the best arrangement. In many cases such an industrial, Taylorian approach leads to miscommunication, disassociation from client and user needs and, somewhat ironically, higher cost. People in such teams are swapped in and out, like cogs in a machine, each seeing only a small part of the process and often never really understanding what they’re contributing to. It’s the kind of teamwork that management writers in the 90s mocked mercilessly (look at anything by Rosabeth Kanter on this).

An alternative approach, and one that’s increasingly being shown to offer clients better value, is to establish smaller, stable teams in which more highly trained people overlap their roles. Overlapping is the critical characteristic. So the learning designer is also an IA (information architecture) expert, who understands graphical interfaces; the graphics person produces a technical working prototype that can evolve into the final product without needing a technical builder; the technical person, if they’re required at all, edits the copy…and so on.  Each transgresses substantially onto the territory of the other. Such teams are more responsive, more capable of delivering what the client needs, and more able to manage themselves.

At the heart of the team is what I’d call an “e-learning producer”, a role that should evolve from our current learning (instructional) designer role. This person designs the learning experience, manages the project and plays a key part in actually building the final product; they have technical build skills. Learning designers are doing this increasingly anyway, using rapid authoring tools. This is going to become more and more productive as such tools increase in sophistication.

There is an increasing number of small e-learning companies, and in-house facilities building themselves around this kind of person, and I’m going to be monitoring their progress carefully. What our e-learning producer now needs is a flexible, sophisticated design and build tool, which I'll write about elsewhere. Neither the current generation of rapid tools, nor higher-end tools such as Flash, are quite right for this role.

It seems to me that if there was a tool that allowed a multi-skilled learning designer (ID) to conceive, prototype and largely deliver a final product, this might move us towards a more fluid, creative situation – and potentially a lower cost one.

That’s where rapid authoring tools come in. Using Articulate, or most other rapid tools, I can do the whole lot, from start to finish. The trouble is, these tools are – or have been until recently – too restrictive to generate anything more than the most basic interactive learning experiences. So although I can experiment, try things out with learners and clients and evolve my design as I’m building my final application, I can do so only within the tightest of constraints. 

I got a bit excited when I read what Clive Shepherd said about Adobe Captivate a few months ago. His implication, which I’m picking up from lots of sources now, is that Captivate has moved on from its previous positioning as the rapid systems trainer’s efficiency tool of choice. Apparently I can do some pretty ambitious things in Captivate now, and not just in the area of systems sims.

So a few days ago, when I had a few hours spare, I tried it out. I set out to replicate some of my favourite MCQ structures (“favourite MCQ structures” isn’t a phrase you see often…) in Captivate to see how far I could stretch it in a very short time, without getting drawn into coding, Actionscripting or similar. I wanted to see if I could use workarounds (following Tom Kulman’s lead) to produce more interesting MCQ-type interactions than Captivate has built in.

I also set myself the constraints of having to originate or source all the assets (backgrounds, photos, videos, music, voiceover etc.) in the time I had available, (between just before lunch and picking up my son from the the childminder at 4.30pm) just to see if I could, even loosely call the process “rapid”. You can see the results via the links below. It’s worth pointing out that none of this is optimized (pre-loaders, compression etc.). 

• Video-based MCQ - watch 3 videos then choose which one answers the question.
• Simple scenario - two versions of a basic scenario including alternative feedbacks, consequences etc.; the second one also has rollover resources to help the learner make decisions.
• "Are you sure" MCQ - answer a question; before reading feedback, you're prompted to have a re-think; then you get feedback/consequences

Captivate clearly isn’t my dream tool yet. But I’m happy now that I could produce, in a few hours, with help from a graphic artist, what I’ve often been told could take days, and involve developers, project mangers and so on. 

Getting back to the main point, I’m convinced that using a tool like this, I can offer better value to clients and learners, because I’ll not get tied up in over-complex development processes and lose sight of why I’m doing what I’m doing. I’ll offer more creative solutions because I’m in control of the whole thing, while not being overly constrained, as I am when I use more basic rapid tools. 

A tool like this is – potentially – the basis for very different development processes; processes that can professionalise our industry and offer far better value to clients. NOT because they’re cheaper and quicker, but because they produce better results.

Although these samples are very rough, they taught me some important things:

• All interactions are trackable and scorable, so they could be assembled into a scored scenario, or sequence of scored events. I don’t need to use Captivate’s built in quiz mechanisms, which look a bit crude. So I can build courses, scenarios, games even that have scored and un-scored sequences interchangeably. When I’ve asked this of developers, they’ve tended to suck in their teeth and reach for their code books…
• I can add pretty decent accessibility features very quickly.
• I don’t have to use Actionscript at all, just a few slightly clumsy workarounds. This is important because various sources (including Kineo) have pointed out that Captivate’s Actionscript implementation isn't perfect.
• Now I’ve done these, I could professionalise them in a couple of hours and customize or re-skin them in minutes. That’s rapid enough for me.

This approach – pushing a rapid tool to do things it’s not entirely comfortable with – clearly has its limitations. There are all sorts of things I can’t do: video-driven multi-select MCQs, ratings, decent-looking drag and drops, and so on…But if Adobe could fill in the gaps a bit, improve on the SCORM functionality, and support the product better, I’m sure they’d find a ready market. 

And we could all stop driving poor old e-learners nuts by offering them such dull rubbish. 

PS – having re-read this posting, parts of it read like an advert for Captivate. I promise you it isn’t. I don’t care what tool I use, as long as it does what I need it to do.

The replies have been really useful. I'm going to do a full summary in a few days, but briefy so far it's things like:

• Storytelling skills (including dialogue writing)
• Knowledge of gaming patterns
• Creative thinking skills
• Knowledge of scoring devices and mechanisms

What's come up in the conversation is that the role of e-learning ID/LDs in the design of SGs should, fairly obviously, be to input "learning expertise" into the process; to ensure that the "interleaving" of learning and gaming is effective.

But here's the problem: I'm not convinced that most ID/LDs - I'm talking about the foot-soldiers in the large agencies and the writer/producer/trainers in large organisations, not the bloggers and gurus - really know enough about learning to help much. The skills that the e-learning industry, as currently constituted, has taught these people, centre around client management and content processing, not learning experience design. These people are very highly skilled - don't get me wrong. But they don't know much about learning, because the endless swathes of systems training, product knowledge, procedure and compliance courses don't need learning expertise. Most IDs/LDs can squeeze a manual into a set of powerpoint slides, drag 'n drops and MCQs...but has their work taught them how to change people and improve performance? I don't think so. 

I'll push my point further. Firstly, many types of SG demand that designers shift from a content processing mindset towards one based around experience design. But tools and methodologies in the e-learning mainstream have very widely militated against experience design, in favour of ever more efficient content processing. Most rapid tools, as I've written elsewhere, are aimed at allowing monkeys to write dull rubbish. Again, don't get me wrong: you can use rapid tools to produce fantastically creative stuff, but that's not what they're aimed at. They're efficiency tools, and they've tended to push our already inappropriately skilled IDs/LDs further down the efficiency (as opposed to effectiveness) dead end.

Secondly, a critical problem is that, at least until the last few months, the e-learning industry have been commercially successful. So the feedback that e-learning designers are receiving from clients is "we like you...more of the same please". This is a little different from what many learners are saying, but in the great majority of cases, e-learners are not consulted on their views. A consequence of this dubious success is that I have sometimes observed, when trying to train e-learning designers in sophisticated (i.e. change oriented) learning methods, they are resistant; "our clients don't need this". (OK - but your learners do, and if you just bothered to measure effectiveness, I think your clients' minds would change pretty sharpish). This contrasts strongly with games designers, ad agency "creatives" and other non-e-learning design professionals, who I love working with, not just because of their creativity, but because of their open approach to learning about learning. I was once forced by a senior ad executive to stay behind after a workshop until 2am (no booze involved!) just talking about problem-based learning...

So I think the Serious Games community has to answer some "serious" questions:

• who's going to design the convincing, commercially-viable, performance-oriented SG's of the future? Is it the current generation of e-learning designers?
• how are we going to cultivate these designers? 
• are the e-learning agencies the gateway into SGs? Or are marketing/advertising/design agencies, who tend to be more customer/solution oriented, likely to be more responsive? Or specialist SG agencies, which is the current model? We shall see...