Interactive Simulation Newsletter

WELCOME!

This month, we're focusing on two topics. First, a brief 'perspective tip' to help you determine which content is necessary for your training, and second, a brief survey of popular toolkits you can use to produce software simulations.

It is old news now that Macromedia has released Flash MX 2004 and FMX 2004 Professional, but we are still trying to figure out some of the new, interesting parts so that we can make a migration to the new architecture. People have been asking us whether there will be a new book for the new Flash release, and, so far, we reply that we are not coming out with a new book. In our view, most of the material in the book is still pretty relevant, although Macromedia has re-architected the components. Nonetheless, probably in 1-2 months, we'll be coming out with updates to our code for use in Flash MX 2004 and Flash MX 2004 Professional.

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This month, we do not have any downloadable code in our subscriber's edition, but we'll be getting back into that in next month's issue. If you have a story to tell about a simulation project you are developing or have developed, please let us know. By sharing and discussing our experiences, we all become better simulation developers!

For companies that don't have the budget to hire professional instructional designers, designing training is often the responsibility of an instructor who naturally is a subject matter expert (SME). Somewhat ironically, that person can be both the best and the worst person you want designing your computer-based instruction.

The successful "live instruction" instructor can be the best person to the degree that he or she, among other things, knows the content well, understands the needs of the target audience, and has the knowledge and sensitivity to evaluate student performance. On the other hand, this instructor can be the worst person to lead the design because often SME's have a passion for the content that goes well beyond what the students need to know to perform proficiently. It may be more difficult for an instructor with a passion for the material to distinguish what information must be transferred to students to gain proficiency, i.e., the necessary knowledge or skills, from the information that falls into the "good to know" category, or information surrounding the core knowledge, but not necessary to perform at the required level.

One of the roles of the instructional designer is to help the team tease apart the knowledge or skills that are necessary from those that are not. Too often, the instructional designer role is simply as a technical writer, to organize and edit whatever material the subject matter experts produce. Often CBT is not much more than a synopsis of a manual or live instructional material with a multiple-choice question test tacked onto the end (and developed last in the process). While subconsciously we recognize that the test is a weak attempt to assess proficiency, the prevailing thought is that by throwing at the student all the material, in all its glory, somehow the student will retain enough of the information that is necessary to know, even if that retention was never tested. We all see the flaw in this process, but it is much harder to take responsibility for designing a good exam.

A simple but powerful technique used by instructional designers to help separate necessary content from additional, "good to know" material is to start the design process in reverse: write the assessment before figuring out what content is necessary to teach.

In other words, before you start to collect or organize the content, have the designer use the SME (or yourself, if you happen to be the same person) to write or describe a performance exam that would convince the SME that a student is proficient to the desired level. While this approach is simple to understand in theory, it is hard to do in practice.

The exam is a great way to help focus your list of performance objectives. Once you have these objectives, and a good way to measure whether or not the objectives have been achieved, you can design, collect, and organize only the necessary content to enable students to achieve those objectives. If you feel that you are "giving away" the answers by only including content precisely necessary to answer the questions, then you likely need to do one or more of the following:

• Generalize your assessment;
• Develop better discriminatory tools for assessing retention, such as simulation-based methods;
• Write separate performance objectives that substantiate the inclusion of additional material.

In our experience, such an investment in determining the exam right up front will pay for itself many times over, reducing time and money that would have been spent on organizing what really is irrelevant content--and, perhaps more importantly, wasted time and money for the learner.

BACK TO TOP

Even though our book focused on device and product training, we get many questions about simulating software programs. Much of the same material we put forth in the book regarding how to design and implement processes and interfaces are applicable to the software realm. However, there are more programs available to design training for software programs than for devices, and, consistent with our philosophy of using the right tool for the job, if you can develop training to meet and measure your performance goals, you should use those programs.

People sometimes get the impression that we are anti-toolkits, yet nothing could be farther from the truth. Simply put, we find that many clients buy toolkit "solutions" before really understanding the training issues and what needs to get done. This is similar to the company that wants to buy "a simulator" but then doesn't plan specifically how that simulator will be used, or which features and fidelity are really necessary. It's no wonder, then, that the most common complaint we hear is that the toolkit can't scale/adapt to meet the needs of the problem. Therefore, before you invest in a toolkit, we recommend that you carefully identify the specific aims and requirements of your problems. You may find you can accomplish quite a lot with something that may be considered less technically sophisticated. Alternatively, you might find that your issues require solutions that are outside the range of a toolkit's capability.

To conduct our informal survey, we looked for companies that sell products described to build "software simulations.". This set is not comprehensive, but we tried hard to find as many as we could. We wrote to each vendor to request a blurb about its product for inclusion in this newsletter. Of those solicited for information, we received descriptions from the first two, eHelp and Knowledge Quest. The rest of the descriptions we adapted from information on the vendors' web sites. While this newsletter often deals with issues in Flash, the toolkits by and large do not use Flash, except for RoboDemo.

Please let us know if you find other toolkits for future versions of our roundup!

Note: In some cases, the blurbs were taken from the product web sites, so, as always, caveat emptor!

Firefly

Knowledge Impact’s Firefly application simulation creation tool combines comprehensive functionality with unrivaled ease-of-use. Firefly was designed and developed by experts in adult learning theory to generate scenario-based simulations with active components, multi-path support, and progressive feedback – without requiring plug-ins or client software.

RapidBuilder

We constantly run into all different people around the country and world who have interesting simulation projects they have in mind or have prepared. We want to encourage you simulator programmers, instructional designers, gamers, managers, and other developers to share your stories and best practices with the rest of us. We invite you to lead or join the discussion on our FlashSim discussion board:

http://FlashSim.infopop.cc/

We also will monitor the discussions for particular topics that might make good newsletter information, so go forth and post!

If you have suggestion for topics you'd like to see in the newsletter, or links to events or interesting Flash pieces you've made, please email us at newsletter@FlashSim.com.