Scenario-based e-Learning: Evidence-Based Guidelines for Online Workforce Learning

CHAPTER 6

BUILDING GUIDANCE IN SCENARIO-BASED e-LEARNING

Perhaps your most important design decisions involve the amount and type of guidance you provide in your scenario-based e-learning environment. Research tells us that pure discovery learning does not work. “Instructional programs evaluated over the past fifty years consistently point to the ineffectiveness of pure discovery” (Mayer, 2004, p. 17). Learning environments that lack guidance fail to manage what I call the flounder factor. Learners engage in unproductive trial-by-error explorations. The results are at best inefficient learning and, at worst, no learning and/or learner dropout. In this chapter I review some common techniques you can use to build a guided discovery (versus a discovery) ...