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Building effective scenarios is a major challenge in designing a scenario based e-learning course.

The challenge lies in building scenarios that are:

• Realistic ( Based on day to day activities of the learners)
• Relevant (Learners must be able to relate to the scenarios)
• Precise ( Scenarios cannot be long winding)
• Sensible ( Scenarios must have depth)
• Cater to the Learning Objectives ( Scenarios must be based on the learning objectives defined)

Consider you have to create a scenario based Course on Leadership skills. Let’s say the SME has
given you all the information he/she has on the subject in pdf format.

This is what you discover after evaluating the content:

• You find the content unstructured and scattered
• You feel the information presented is not learner centric
• You find the example and the scenarios given in the pdf  is not enough or too simple
• You find lot of missing information

Now you wonder how do you build scenarios using the such information.

Here are some tips to handle this kind of a situation.

Internalise the Information

Given a situation as I mentioned before, you cannot just work with the content superficially. You need to think beyond the given content. You need to internalize the subject. You need understand the essence of the information you are going to deal with.

Think From the Perspective of the Learner

When you are evaluating the content or structuring the content, always think from the learners’ point of view.

Think in terms of usefulness of the information and how the learner will be able to put the information to practical use.

This will help you get an idea about the scenarios that you are going to build for the course.

There is a marked differnce between listing  the benefits of a product and specifying how the product can be used by the person. Specifying  how someone can use the product is more relevant to the customer than simply listing the benefits.

The bottomline is never miss out on the learners’ point of view.

Read Up on the Subject and the Context

It gets very important for you to get a good understanding about the subject and the context you are dealing with. If the course is about leadership, apart from getting yourself familiar with leadership concepts, you need to find out information about the relevant industry and learner job profiles.

If the leadership skills course is for the software industry then you build scenarios based on how things happen in a software company.You fix the leadership skills as it would be relevant for someone in the software industry.

Make Best Use of SME Support

While working on a scenario based course, you typically interact with the SME continuously. Instead of asking SMEs to give you scenarios, do some research and trying coming up with a basic storyline for the scenario and ask the SME for inputs.

This way the SME is assured that you are also taking a lot of interest in the subject and he/she will be interested to help you.

It is very important that you understand what kind of information you would need to build the scenarios.
So you need to ask the SME the right questions and get the right information. 

Discuss Scenarios With Friends and Colleagues

You cannot work in seclusion while working on a scenario based course. Most of the time you will not have all the information. So what you do is discuss with people around. This way your source for information is not restricted. You get broader perspectives.

Get Scenarios Validated

No matter how much you hunt for information, the fact is that you are not an expert in the subject you are dealing with. So always get all the scenarios and information you are going to cover in the course validated by the SME.

With this I end the post here and leave it open for discussion.

You have more tips to share? Please leave your tips in the Comments section for the benefit of all Instructional Designers who visit this blog