Book review
Simulations and the future of learning: An innovative
(and perhaps revolutionary approach to e-learning)
Jossey Bass Wiley, October 2003
Author: Clark Aldrich
Review by Stephen Walsh, Consultant, Epic
If you care about how to do e-learning right, this book is indispensable.
Part case study, part learning design manual, part one man's rage
against the e-learning industry, it's crammed with practical information
and manages to be a page-turner at the same time (not that Clark
Aldrich approves of page-turners!).
Aldrich started looking at e-learning from the outside in. As founder
of the e-learning practice at the highly influential Gartner Group,
he met with practically every e-learning company in America. His
view could make or break market perception of a company. He sat
through CEO pitch after pitch on how their model was unique/scalable/insert
buzzword here.
His conclusion? 'So far, e-learning has made about the same contributions
to learning as fast food has made to food'. He points out that both
industries are driven by low-cost, high profit goals. Their products
allow for minimal deviation from standards. Development and consumption
must be simple and rapid - get in, get something from the standard
menu, get out. We're in a world of 'drive-through content'. It's
enough to turn your stomach.
Who gets the best training in the world? Aldrich's answer is, those
professions where mistakes cost lives: the army, surgeons, pilots.
What their training has in common is an emphasis on highly realistic
and immersive simulation; an emphasis that didn't seem to be on
the e-learning industry's agenda (he really should have talked to
Epic).
So Aldrich did the decent thing. He quit Gartner, got his hands
dirty, and threw himself into building an e-learning simulation
that honoured the deal. This book tells the compelling and instructive
story of what happened next.
Over 300 pages, Aldrich tells what it took to build "Virtual
Leader", a high-end, Playstation-quality simulation of leadership.
His advice to those who aspire to do likewise is:
1. Play a lot of games.
Like many of us, Aldrich believes there is much to be learned from
games manufacturers. The simulation approach used in The Sims, Roller
Coaster Tycoon and others have the playability, open-endedness,
and realism factors that simulations can use. Games follow the advice
that Aristotle dispensed some time ago: the only way to learn is
by doing. The problem with games is that they don't teach anything
that's really worth knowing (unless you are a spy or a rally driver).
But a leadership game could change that.
His first piece of advice: Buy several games and play them for
hours - and tell your loved ones that it's for research purposes.
2. Get the content model right.
To teach leadership, you'd expect the natural route to be find
a guru and teach their method. He talked to a lot of university
professors to unearth the best model, but found that he had a problem
with the way <i>they</i> believed content should be
presented: i.e. in a highly linear fashion. Aldrich discovered that
linear content did not lend itself to the cyclical, open-ended model
we find in games. So he dumped the SME route and developed his own
model (at this point you start to wonder if he's going to develop
his own operating system while he's at it).
In essence his model states that all leaders are trying to 'get
a group of people to complete the work'. The three forces that exert
themselves on work are:
* power - the more you have or can earn, the more you achieve the
right work
* ideas - generate the right ones or encourage others to, and suppress
the wrong ones
* tension - the right level of tension generates a productive atmosphere
Everyone in the organisation has a different balance of power,
ideas, and tension. Effective leaders need to read individuals'
balances, and adjust it through influence to achieve their goals.
Several chapters are dedicated to the detail behind this model,
and how it is applied in meetings (the setting for his simulation).
Watch people in meetings and you quickly realise that this open-ended
model of leadership and how people relate to each other is highly
accurate. And he wasn't even trying to develop a theory of leadership!
3. Worry about realism, not reality
Having developed a non-linear, open-ended leadership model, the
challenge was how to emulate it. Aldrich spends a lot of time discussing
the sets and characters he and his team developed for the game.
The challenge was to make it realistic without worrying about representing
every possible outcome. He points out that 100% accuracy is not
the goal: being descriptive about potential outcomes is more instructive
than being predictive about precise outcomes. The designers of Virtual
Leader developed a smart graphics engine that enables characters
to react in certain ways depending on their work/tension/ideas/power
balance (e.g. they might look at the ceiling if bored, stand up
if frustrated). Not that this is exactly how people always react
- but it's suggestive of a mindset.
Aldrich learns the lesson that game developers knew all along:
The goal is to emulate reality, not to re-create it. The chapters
that focus on how to emulate reality - i.e. the graphics, dialogue
and artificial intelligence engines that drive the simulation -
are somewhat technical, but no less readable for that.
4. Gameplay is everything, and the hardest thing
It's late in the development cycle before the team can actually
'play' a working version of Virtual Leader. Only when they put it
in front of focus groups do they realise some serious problems:
How do I know I'm progressing? How long is it supposed to take?
What's my goal? Should it be this hard? Tweaking and redesigning
follow. Anyone who's developed an e-learning course and watched
how people actually use it will find these chapters painfully familiar.
A couple of weaknesses.
Firstly, the book is written more from the designer's perspective
than the user's. This may be because Virtual Leader was in the early
stages of rollout when the book was written, so there's not much
to go on, but it'd be useful to have more anecdotes on how people
are actually using the simulation and whether it is having the desired
impact.
Secondly, you get the sense that Aldrich had considerable time
and resources at his disposal, luxuries few of us have in tight
development cycles. Some of his wisdom is challenging to apply within
the constraints of a more typical e-learning project. Maybe he should
make his code open-source…
Over all, anyone involved in critiquing, designing or purchasing
e-learning will find Aldrich's experiences and advice highly relevant.
He has advanced the debate on what we can learn from games, and
how e-learning should work. And he's given us an excuse to play
Grand Theft Auto all day.
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