As nearly any eleven year-old kid, who has a fish tank in their bedroom knows, the betta fish needs a particular environment in order to thrive. Owning and maintaining a tank full of fish takes a fair amount of analysis, planning, revising, and immersion (pun intended) into the world of fish. Failure to pursue your fish education will likely result in sub-optimal results, i.e., dead fish.
You may ask, “what does any of this have to do with scenario-based e-learning?” Consider Ruth Clark’s definition of it:
Scenario-based e-learning is a preplanned guided inductive learning environment designed to accelerate expertise in which the learner assumes the role of an actor responding to a work-realistic assignment or challenge, which in turn responds to reflect the learner’s choices.
Clark, R. C. (2013). Scenario-based e-learning: Evidence-based guidelines for online workforce learning. John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Rather than get too into the weeds of equating fish tanks to learning environments and eleven year-olds to fish caretakers, let’s step back and talk about me, and my acquaintance with scenario-based e-learning. To learn about me, watch this…
As a business video maker who has produced training media, and as a former production executive for a training software startup that developed courseware for bankers, I appreciate the value of applying learning theories to scenario-based training. For the training company I worked on creating tightly scripted media used to illustrate essential concepts bankers needed to understand. In Clark’s taxonomy (Clark), this would fall under the research, analysis, and rationale and tradeoff domains of workforce training (p. 23), and was an ideal use of scenario-based e-learning. Actors in the various videos might take the roles of advisors or clients. The objectives for these trainings were typically articulated to cultivate greater sophistication with the distinctions of corporate finance, derivative instruments, and capital markets, e.g., given a mid-sized manufacturer’s desire to raise capital, the learner will select from a range of debt instruments, and support that choice with appropriate rationale. Good stuff, but that was then.
Now as a student once again, I’m diving into scenario-based e-learning head first and for this post I will examine a sample course entitled Blue Beta Facilities Orientation and identify its constituent components. For that, please view the following.
As for the betta fish… um, it’s not beta, it’s betta. Oops. Well, betta luck next time.
References
Clark, R. C. (2013). Scenario-based e-Learning. Wiley.