How to deliver nuanced content at scale with a personalized scenario (video and example)

How can you balance the business need of fast elearning production with the big impact that personalization has for learners? Go behind the scenes of a first-person scenario that’s been tailored for different working environments in this #Designer’sCut to see how we’ve tackled personalization at scale with discrimination training.

3 ideas for making your scenarios stick

1. Apply 80/20

The more personal and relevant your digital learning is, the more likely learners are to see value in it and choose to engage fully. Personalization can take many forms, from quick wins like pulling in a learner’s name from your LMS to address them directly, to high-effort techniques like in-depth learner interviews so you can shape multiple scenarios around real-life situations. Somewhere near the middle of that continuum are pragmatic 80/20 approaches – making approximately 20% content changes for different audience groups in order to achieve the relevance that employees need in their learning experiences.

Start by making sure the core of your scenario works across all working environments. We chose a situation where a colleague had been newly promoted, and now had to attend a meeting that clashed with Friday Prayer. He reported a discrimination case.

Build your scenario around this situation, initially setting it in one of your working environments; we chose the Headquarters of a retail company. When you’re happy with the core content and flow, duplicate it and make the necessary image and text tweaks to make it appropriate for another environment; we chose a retail store.

Finalizing one story first makes it much quicker to make tweaks to other versions at the end – a win-win for you and your learners.

2. Encourage opinions

Scenarios are perfect for tackling nuanced content such as discrimination where people rarely think in a black and white way. Rather than having ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ answers from the start, engage your learners by eliciting their thoughts and opinions. Encourage them to put themselves in the character’s shoes; building empathy will make the story more memorable for them.

3. Tailor your final message to drive home the learning point

Opinions and ideas are an important part of the learning process, but even nuanced content has a set of principles or laws underneath it that learners need to be clear on. 

The beauty of asking questions and eliciting opinions is that you can keep track of which learners have which opinions and provide tailored results pages that drive home the learning points they need. In this example, someone who correctly identified the case of direct discrimination can be congratulated and invited to be an equality champion in the business. On the other hand, someone who thought this wasn’t a case of discrimination can be corrected, using facts and details about the law to explain why.

Explore this example for yourself, or find out more about how scenario-based learning can drive performance improvement.

We can help you do it!

Interested in seeing how this personalized scenario was created in Elucidat or use is as a starting point for your own project? Book a demo and our team will get you set up with a free trial account.