DevLearn will be different this year. The Learning Guild has planned a two-week online experience, since it’s not safe for us all to fly to Las Vegas. I’m presenting a live session and facilitating an After Hours Buzz conversation.

Streamlining Branching Scenario Planning and Design

My live session is #1023 at 10:00 AM PDT/1:00 PM EDT on Friday, October 30. I’m packing a lot of tips into this 45-minute session. Everyone should get something useful out of it.

Branching scenarios can be a great solution for giving people an opportunity to practice making relevant decisions. While they can be a valuable experience for learners, building branching scenarios can be time-consuming and challenging. If the first decision point has three choices, and those three each have three choices, and then those three have three choices, suddenly you have 40 slides after only three decisions for the learner. The complexity of that structure grows exponentially and can be tricky to manage as an instructional designer. Additionally, SMEs who are accustomed to working on traditional eLearning may be uncomfortable with branching, and you may be unsure how to get good stories and examples from them. It’s easy to feel overwhelmed in the process of planning and designing branching scenarios. What you need is a better process for creating them.

In this session you’ll learn how to streamline your processes for branching scenarios, from initial planning through writing and creating a functional prototype. You’ll start from the beginning by analyzing the problem you’re trying to solve and identifying your objectives. You’ll learn what questions to ask SMEs and other sources to get stories and examples to incorporate in your branching scenario. You’ll learn tactics for eliciting responses from SMEs if you’re “stuck.” You’ll get tips for planning the flow of your scenario, including comparing different branching structures of varied complexity. You’ll see how the free, open-source tool Twine can streamline the process of planning, writing, and prototyping branching scenarios. You’ll learn the advantages of writing one complete path in the branching scenario from start to finish before fleshing out the alternative paths. You’ll learn how to give learners opportunities to correct their mistakes in ways that both deepen learning and simplify your design. By the end of this session, you’ll have a streamlined process for planning, designing, writing, and prototyping branching scenarios that can then be built in any authoring tool you want. This streamlined process will help you save time and make the complexity of branching scenarios more manageable.

In this session, you will learn:

• What questions and tactics elicit relevant stories and examples from SMEs
• How to use Twine for planning, writing, and prototyping branching scenarios
• How giving learners opportunities to fix mistakes can streamline branching design
• How to use different branching structures for scenarios
• What to write first in a branching scenario

Feedback on this presentation

The last time I gave this session, 92% of attendees said they’d be able to use this information in the next 3-6 months.

After Hours Buzz

I’m also facilitating a discussion on Designing & Developing Scenarios. This will be like the Morning Buzz sessions at the in person conferences, except later in the day so you don’t need so much coffee.

This conversation will be on Tuesday, October 27 at 4:45-5:30 EDT/1:45-2:30 PDT.

Failing Forward: Instructional Design in the Trenches

Completely separate from DevLearn, I contributed a story to the Learning Guild’s latest ebook: Failing Forward: Instructional Design in the Trenches. It’s all about mistakes we have made and what we learned from them.

You can download the ebook here. (A free Guild membership is required. I recommend that for anyone in the elearning industry, so you can get access to their resources).

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