Welcome to the toolkit

We're about to walk through a practical approach to scenario design. Soon, your lively, challenging scenarios will help people practice what they need to do on the job.

The toolkit will help you:

• Get the insight you need from the subject matter expert
• Create mini-scenarios and branching scenarios for any format (live or elearning)
• Write realistic questions and challenging distractors
• Help people learn from the consequences of their decisions
• Avoid common mistakes in design and production

Recommended: Apply the toolkit to a project

The toolkit is designed to be applied to a real-world project.

If you don't have a project, you could just plow through all the activities and videos and pronounce yourself "trained," but you're in L&D. You know that just being exposed to information doesn't change what you do on the job. You need to apply it.

That's why the toolkit has lots of on-the-job tasks, worksheets, and interactive decision tools -- to help you apply it immediately.

Ideally, you'll first analyze the problem as described in Partner from the Start, but if you didn't, no problem -- the first section of this toolkit gives you lots of links to help you examine the problem and confirm that training is part of the solution.

Then, just keep going down through the menu on the left. It's a step-by-step process to create your prototype activity.

Once you've created a prototype, the rest of the process is straightforward.

What kind of project?

The ideal project has these characteristics:

• The goal is to change what adults do on the job, not to help them pass a knowledge exam or "learn about X."
• The audience is a specific group, like "employees of Division Q," and not "anyone in the world who wants to do X better."
• The tasks that people need to perform on the job require some judgement.
• You have access to the subject matter expert and some learners.

If you're hoping to design scenarios for an off-the-shelf product, you can still use the toolkit. However, you might want to find some learners to give you feedback and help you focus the activities.

Practice with Carla

In addition to applying the toolkit to your own project, you'll practice applying it to a fictional project for our client, Carla.

You'll learn about Carla and her problems with alien leave in the next section.

But first, let's make sure you're ready to design activities.