Looking for Creative ideas for software simulation courses...

Hi Diane,

I have been completely guilty of putting out highly instructive, painfully boring software courses. It doesn't help that it's what people pretty much expect from software training. The route I take now is to make sure that stakeholders understand that people do not learn software by watching a video or taking an eLearning course. Until we have the ability to upload new skills directly to our brains a la Matrix style, we need hands on practice. This one thing alone allows me to cut down on how much is in the courses. Seeing it does not equal knowing it. So let's get the learners familiar with what the software can do and then provide help resources for practice or for on-the-job guidance. 

Now we focus more on keeping the courses lean and conceptual and then providing a lot of OnDemand/JIT resources. We use Storyline to record a series of short, informal tutorials (think YouTube) that show the employees how to do something very specific. We also make user-friendly job aids. We then have a separate library of tutorials employees can pull up as needed. The thing I love about using SL for this is that we'll use some of the same recordings in the courses as optional to "see it" and convert to Try Mode as an option to "practice". When you get away from feeling like every bit of instruction has to come from inside the course, it frees you up to make the course more interesting and even tell a story.

That being said, I'm ALWAYS looking for more ways to make technical training  interesting and even fun so I'm looking forward to seeing what else the community shares here.