Rating:

In a hurry?  Recommendation   

Is your training department struggling to raise the level of interactivity of its online courses? Is your CLO demanding you start using game-based learning to increase learner “stickiness”? Is it time you engaged e-learners instead of abusing them?

If any of these questions apply to you, Clark Quinn’s book Engaging Learning: Designing e-Learning Simulation Games should find a home on your bookshelf or, better yet, in the hands of your instructional designers and writers. It’s not an easy read, and it may trigger flashbacks of reading a college textbook. Nevertheless, it is a valuable guide to making the web-based learning experience more fun.

Quinn uses a formal approach, providing in the introduction descriptions of the content to be covered in each chapter, concise summaries at the end of each chapter, and a wrapup at the end of the book (mandatory reading for Ed Tech students). He even suggests which chapters to skip if learning theory is not your idea of a good time. The introduction states the purpose of the book: “to present the reader with a process to design e-learning simulation games.” That’s not a simple mission, yet I think he accomplishes it.

Quinn challenges e-learning developers to stop designing learning the old way—text-and-graphic page-turners with some drag and drops for interactivity. He is all about designing experiences—bravo!

In the first four chapters, the author reviews traditional instructional design methods, rules of engaging learners, and ways to bring these theories together to create better e-learning. Finding methods common to the entertainment business and the learning business is the primary purpose of Chapter Four. Quinn’s real world experience plays a part in making this and the following chapters a good read. Overall, Chapters Five through Seven provide the practical advice—the how-tos, the useful information that can be put to work today.

For instance, he summarizes the necessary ingredients for engaging e-learning experiences as follows:

1. Thematic Coherence—consistent story lines and content
2. Clear Goal—the learner must understand what is to be achieved
3. Balanced Challenge—can’t be too easy or too hard
4. Relevance: Action to Domain—what the learner is doing must be relevant
5. Relevance:  Problem to Learner—the game type must be of interest
6. Choices of Action—learner needs to be faced with choices
7. Direct Manipulation—player needs to act directly with interface
8. Action Coupling—there should be consequences for choices made
9. Novel Information or Events—play should contain elements of chance

He argues several times for taking the “overused multiple choice question” and turning it into a “decision point” and creating four levels of engagement that are progressively more difficult:

1. Mini Scenario
2. Linked Scenario
3. Contingent Scenario
4. The Full Monty (game)

Real world examples are provided for each level of engagement.

Chapter Six details a design process to create engaging e-learning. Chapter Seven provides rapid-fire, practical tips and emphasizes the need to spend time and resources ensuring the right mental challenge—and suggests you may not need fancy graphics or programming eye candy to make it engaging. Try pencil and paper first—an excellent point.

As a manager of e-learning development, I can use these key ingredients to stimulate others to think beyond the ordinary and require they follow Quinn’s process. I like the idea that I can take his checklists and process steps and create a handout for the development team. Yet, it was a letdown that Quinn doesn’t elaborate on more of the design and graphic details of the case studies and provide more screenshots. Both would enhance the reader’s understanding. Easily grasping the mechanics of creating a branching scenario requires more examples than the book provides. Moreover, although the author was probably limited by the publisher, the page design of the book should be more engaging. Reading should be hard fun, too.

Recommendation
Engaging Learning could be better written, provide more examples, and, ironically, be more engaging for the reader. Nevertheless, for learning managers who want to help their e-learning developers create soundly designed, engaging simulations, this book is a valuable how-to guide.

Engaging Learning Holds user interest      Value of Content      Self-Study Value      Instructional Value      Value for the money      Rating