Speaker 1: Whether you're trying to become an instructional designer or you've been designing e-learning for years, it can always help to see what's out there, get some inspiration, and push the boundaries of your own work. So in this video, I'm going to share five of the best e-learning examples that I've come across. If you've been following me or my content for any amount of time now, then you probably know that I am all here for this scenario-based, story-driven e-learning simulations where you as the learner can go in there and experience things for yourself, make your own choices, forge your own path, kind of like a choose-your-own-adventure book. So naturally, those are the types of examples that I chose for this video, and I'm excited to dive right into it, so let's do that. So these first three examples I'm going to show you are from this website right here, ngpf.org, Next Gen Personal Finance. So I'm on their arcade page, and they have plenty of different learning experiences here that you should definitely check out. But I am going to start with, I think my favorite e-learning experience I've ever found online, which is this one right here, Shady Sam. So students will learn the tricks of the loan trade as they play the role of a loan shark and try to maximize their profits, okay? And again, this is all about personal finance. I am really passionate about that topic, so a few of these examples will be somewhat related to personal finance. But let's dive into it. So here we are, so this is Shady Sam Loan Shark, okay? So shadysam.com is how we can get here. I entered my name, and now we can start playing. So check it out, really nice pixel art, nice use of animation. All of the artwork is super cohesive, and it's pixel art, so it definitely has its own character. But we have mail, the animation is making that clear. So here we are, it's from Shady Sam himself. So hi, Devlin, and welcome to your first day of work at Shady Sam's. Your job is to make as much money as possible off the backs of hardworking Americans. So basically, issue the loans that make us the most profit. Customers will come in with requests. Choose the one that makes us the most money, okay? So you can see where this is going, but let's see how things kick off. So we have this really bold red directing our attention to the door, and we have this cursor when we go over it, so we click this. Here we go, we have our first customer. They wanna buy a convertible, okay. So now we get these different loan options, monthly interest rates. So the monthly payments are all the same. We're gonna go with the one with the highest interest rate because again, our whole goal here as the loan shark is to make the most money. So there we go, we can see our profit just getting added to the top here, and let's continue. Let's see our next customer. So someone else comes in. Can I get 80 grand to open my new gym? Squats are us. And you notice the language here, yo, Devlin, can I get 80 grand to open my new gym? Squats are us. They did such a good job with the conversational tone in this project. I really, really like that, especially because conversational tones are so good for learning. And it's just so neat how they did this. They put us in the role of the loan shark, and we can see this behind-the-scenes communication. Yeah, just make the most money you can off of these hardworking Americans. And it will introduce us to some of these core concepts. Let me show you, let's answer another one. So monthly payment, or the interest rate is the same on all, but this one goes for 168 months. So obviously you do need to know how interest works to answer these questions. So let's see, let's click that one. Just made a ton of profit on that, let's continue. And now we got another email. So if we open up that mail, it's from Shady Sam again. As you can see, the job is pretty simple. People only pay attention to the monthly payment, so we can mess with the interest rates and term lengths to maximize our profit. It's amazing what you can get away with. So choose one of the following. So again, this is showing us that behind-the-scenes communication, where obviously if you're reading this and you don't know about these things, it's like, wait a minute, what's going on here? So you can see how this would really help people pay closer attention in the real world. And then they just have this little positive reinforcement. We get to pick a desk ornament. So let's go with this coffee cup. So you see, they just have those nice little rewards throughout this experience, just as, again, positive reinforcement. So I think you get the idea here. It goes to something like 10 or 12 of these customers that we talked to. And yeah, we can charge fees. They run you into a situation where someone keeps coming back over and over and paying all of these fees on this short-term loan. So it's bad, it exposes a lot of these shady practices and it does it in such an engaging way where you're the one making the choices. You have these little gamified elements to measure your progress and your success. So just last thing we'll look at here, we found a payday loan opportunity. These poor folks are living paycheck to paycheck, no choice, but good old shady Sam. You can get them to agree to basically anything. So then he refers to these 700% interest rate loans, but we're just calling it a fee instead of interest. I have a feeling that's not the last time we'll be seeing Rupali. So it just, again, it goes through this. Go through it yourself if you want. It is a really cool learning experience at shadySam.com. I really like this one. So let me know in the comments what you think about it too, because am I alone? Like just this, the language here, again, it really stands out to me. Well, well, well, look what we found here. In most corporate learning experiences, you don't see conversational language like this, but obviously with some creativity and a bit of a budget and a good writer on hand, you can do some really cool stuff. So let's check out this next one, which is the Uber game. Some of you may have played this. It was quite popular a couple of years back, but the name of the game is, Can You Make It in the Gig Economy? And let's read their little intro for that. Where is the Uber game? Oh, it's right next to it. Can you make it as an Uber driver with two kids to support and a mortgage payment due in a week? Okay, so obviously this is like a very lived reality for some people, but let's ride. And I think this one was made by the Financial Times or at least commissioned by them. So this news game is based on real reporting, including interviews with dozens of Uber drivers. So it seems like this is really to raise awareness about some of the struggles that people in this gig economy face. So I think this is really about empathy. So you're a full-time Uber driver with two kids to support and a $1,000 mortgage payment due in a week. Can you earn enough to pay the bill and make more than other players? Okay, so now we get to choose our difficulty level. So do we wanna go easy? We can live in San Francisco with good bank credit, or do we wanna do harder difficulty where we have bad credit and we can't afford to live in San Francisco? Instead, we live two hours away. So let's go with the harder option. And you can see we have some variables in the top left. We have the amount of money we've earned so far. We have what day of the week it is, and we have our current Uber driver rating. Okay, so the scenario begins. It brings us right into the action. And that's what I love about these learning experiences is we're not sitting through a 20-minute slideshow presentation. It's just immediately bringing us into the story and having us make choices about how to proceed. So we start bright and early on a Monday morning. Pretty soon, we get our first ride request from a Chris, but when we arrive at the pickup point, we don't see anyone waiting. So do we call him or wait? So let's call him. A man's voice answers the phone. I'll be right there, just coming out now. So we won't be rude and say, hurry up, will you? Instead, we'll say, take your time. All right, it's a flustered man with a big backpack and he comes out of a nearby apartment. Okay, that's me, sorry about being late. Okay, what do we do? Drive in silence or strike up a conversation? Let's drive in silence. Okay, we drop him off 20 minutes later. That was easy. Okay, and then we have this nice screen. We see something happened here. We have the time, the number of rides we've completed, any other progress we've made, and then we get to continue. We see we've made $16. So these types of choices continue. You'll see a trend here with this and the next project we'll look at. But really, it's like we are in the driver's seat. I mean, no pun intended, maybe. And we're making the choices about what to do. So if we go with a Dodge minivan, let's go with that. It qualifies for Uber XL rides, higher fares, but our poor credit means it costs $240 a week. We will also have to buy insurance. Let's choose this car. Okay, now we have to choose these other things, an unlimited data plan, cleaning supplies, all of this. So we'll just buy it all and see what happens. We're done shopping. Okay, $156. We used a credit card, so we don't pay right away. So we're not going to go through this whole thing. I encourage you to do so if you want to make it to the ending and experience just how hard it is to really meet this goal. It looks like the URL here is ig.ft.com slash Uber-game. So check this one out if you haven't seen it already. Definitely a good example for this scenario style e-learning. So let's look at another one here. This one is called Payback. Let me just refresh it here. College can help you realize your dreams unless it leaves you with a student loan nightmare. NextGen Personal Finance presents Payback. Get your payback. So this is really about making it through college with as little loans as possible. Let's see how they present it. Students are in the driver's seat as they make decisions to get to and through college. So you can see how nice animations, each scene transitions very well into the next one. And let's get our payback. So look at how cool this is. Like it's very personalized. We get to apply for college. So we select our GPA. Let's say we have a pretty good GPA. We have medium extracurricular involvement and we live in Florida. Now we apply. So lucky us, we received four decision letters. Now we get to decide which school we go to. So you see these choices are really cool, especially because they emulate the choices that actual high school students would face when deciding which college to attend. So in-state public, community college, we can see their prestige ratings, their costs, the aid we can get. So you can see how a keen learner here, we would be looking at the difference between the cost and the aid so we know how much we need to pay out of pocket. Clearly these two are quite expensive. It looks like the out-of-state public is even more expensive than the private based on the aid you can get, but we'll just go with Florida Rockets, the in-state public school. We'll save a ton of money on tuition and we're still close enough to come home on the weekends. Not too bad. So we get this nice little like narrator feedback whenever we make one of those choices. And now we really open up the full experience. Again, it has these variables where we can see how focused we are. We need to keep up with our classes, right? We can see how well we're doing with the connections we've made. We can see how happy we are and we can see how deep we are in student loan debt. So unlike this shady Sam experience, it's not just like make as much money as you can, or in this case, save as much money as you can. It's how can you also balance your happiness, the connections you're making and your focus level along with that debt. And each choice can obviously have an impact on all four of these variables. Okay, so our friend is throwing one last pool party before college starts, but our neighbor offered $100 for a few hours of work. So we get to choose to make memories or make that cash. So we will just make that cash. Nothing like a day spent stuffing envelopes to make you feel like a responsible adult. Besides, chlorine is terrible for your skin. So notice again, the tone here is really, really on point. If we could bring more of this conversational language into some of our scenario-based corporate training, I think it could really go a far away with our audiences. There's a lot of research to back up this conversational tone, resulting in better learning gains. Look into the personalization principle and Mayer's principles if you're not familiar with that. And I have a full video on that too on Mayer's principles, so that might be a good place to start. But back into this, when you get to college, you have to eat. Choose your meal plan. So you see it gives us these choices and it shows the effect it will have on our bottom line here. So these are the same types of choices that college students would have to actually make, but this learning experience is giving us a chance to do that in this risk-free environment. So you can see how, if you were a high school student considering college, you could run through this several times, make different choices, and see how it impacts your in-game life here. All right, we'll have plenty to eat with this meal plan, but it won't cover these extra things, okay? Freshman year is almost here. It's time to sign up for a dorm room. Do we stay in a quad room, request a single, or have a roommate? So staying in a quad room, that will save us some money. Let's see how this choice affects all of these variables at the bottom. All right, so it made us less focused, make more connections, less happy, and more wealthy, so less in debt. So we'll save money and always have company, but with four people, personality clashes are inevitable, and it may be hard to focus. So you see how these meters at the bottom really reinforce the consequences of the different choices that we're making? Again, really great learning experience because the choices you make here are so close to the choices someone would have to make in the real world in this situation. We get to experience it without the real world consequences. This one, it's timeforpayback.com if you want to check it out for yourself. Now we're going to move on to something a bit different. It's not any of these here on the personal finance arcade. This one is Martin Percy's Heart Class. So if you're not familiar with Martin Percy, he's a very well-renowned director, and he does a lot of these really cool cause-based interactive videos. So they're not typically from the e-learning space, but there's definitely very effective e-learning projects that he works on, and he works with Unit 9. So I just want to show you like a minute of this intro video so you can see what this is all about. Mr. Ryan. Alex, guys, come in here. Oh my God, Mr. Ryan. Mr. Ryan, are you OK?

Speaker 2: Call 911. No, we're going to get in trouble. We learned this in school. Call 911. Alex, guys, call 911. Call 83-3-2-1. Oh no, I don't trust him. Oh no, what happened? Alex, come in here. To the b雨rary? Oh my God. Are you OK? Miss Carmine, I told everyone to go first. Call 9-1-1.

Speaker 3: You're gonna break his ribs. Sarah, stop. Guys, shut up. Sarah, stop. You don't know what you're doing. Yes, I do.

Speaker 2: Do not touch patient. Why couldn't we just wait for the ambulance to arrive? You're gonna kill him. No.

Speaker 1: And then the different teams in the class would place their vote, and at the end there would be a team who wins. And it's like time pressured as well, like you're running out of time as you answer the question. So it definitely emulates this high-pressure, act-fast environment. And if you get it wrong, it tells you you got it wrong, and you try again to bring the story forward. So you can see as they're doing CPR, we get this prompt, Can you stop CPR now? Yes or no? And it's like gamified. You see Team Heart and Team Class. You know, it's called Heart Class. So the team is split up into two teams, and some of the results that came from this are just outstanding. They found that Heart Class is 90% more effective than traditional techniques for teaching kids CPR. And you can see how seeing this very realistic, embedded situation, you can see how that would help to be exposed to this and feel some of that stress being faced with these time-sensitive questions, where if you were a student and you found yourself in one of these situations in the real world, you would feel a bit more prepared and knowledgeable. So clearly that's what Martin Percy was expecting, and the results have just, like, topped the charts with these projects. And this is just one of them. So it's inspired and based on Lifesaver, which is a self-paced version of this, not in front of a live class with students. But yeah, Kath Ellis showed me this for the first time, and Martin Percy, I've spoken to him briefly. Very impressive what he's done here. You can see here on life-saver.org.uk. We can see these different interactive films dealing with CPR, cardiac arrest. It's very similar to this, but it's self-paced. So check some of these out. We're not going to go through a full one here, but I will link it in the description just so that you can get the feel for this and see what it's like to go through this on your own. So finally, to wrap this up, this wouldn't be a best e-learning experiences video if it did not have Connect with Haji Kamal. This is Kathy Moore's, like, comic book-style branching scenario that she developed for the U.S. Army. So she worked with her client to develop this, but she did the instructional design work here. And unfortunately, the downside here is that it was developed in flash all the way back in 2010. So the best way we have to experience this video right now is with this video of Kathy going through the experience. So you can read about this here, but it was based on a real-world situation, and the goal is helping a young lieutenant overcome cultural differences with this leader. So it's all about cross-cultural communication, peacekeeping, and building rapport. Okay, so with that in mind, I just want to show you this brief part of the demo. So we see this thought bubble here. I know Haji Kamal is going to offer me chai, but I hate chai, and I'm afraid it will make me sick. What should I do when he offers it? And now we're going to see this discussion between these two lieutenants, and we're going to have to make the, or sorry, the squad leaders, but we're going to have to make the choice about what to do here. So let me just play this piece here.

Speaker 3: He could just say, no thanks, I'm not thirsty. It's okay to be direct if you do it respectfully, and Haji Kamal will respect him for being honest.

Speaker 2: It would be more polite to say he's allergic and can't drink chai. Haji Kamal will know it's a white lie, and that's okay. They do it all the time here.

Speaker 3: But that would start the relationship out with a lie. Lieutenant Harrell would have to keep it up for his whole deployment. But he shouldn't just say no.

Speaker 2: He would offend the Haji from the get-go when we're here to build rapport.

Speaker 1: Okay. So you get some insight into both sides. You see different recommendations about what you should do here. So this is a very, very nuanced scenario. Again, there are 12 different paths through this experience. So when you answer one of these questions incorrectly, it doesn't just say, oh, try again. It keeps bringing you through the story. The different paths intersect. And if you choose enough right answers, maybe you'll get to an ending that is agreeable. And if not, you're going to have to try it again. So we see, we see Haji Kamal here. He says, welcome. Please let me pour you some chai. What do you recommend that Lieutenant Harrell say? No thanks, I'm not thirsty. I wish I could drink chai, but unfortunately I'm allergic to it. Or thank you, I like some chai. So again, as we make these choices, we'll continue seeing the consequences from those choices, these discussions right here from these squad leaders, and we'll have to make these informed decisions. And if you do read this page on Kathy Moore's blog, you can just Google connect with Haji Kamal, but I'll link this below. You can see just how much nuance and how complex this project is. This is, this is, and has been for a while, I imagine, one of the gold standards when it comes to e-learning branching scenarios. So this one is very, you know, this one is in our e-learning context, not for a general public audience. Kathy Moore does such good work. If you're not familiar with that, she created this action mapping method that really, really, really helps people in the corporate instructional design space. So if you're new to action mapping, definitely check out my video on that, just as a nice intro. But Kathy Moore also has a wonderful book called Map It that will help you design some scenario-based learning experiences just like this. But particularly ones that will help produce business results. So I'm sure all of you here are already familiar with Kathy Moore, but wonderful content from her. Thank you so much for making it to the end here. I really liked going through these learning experiences with you. Please drop a comment letting me know which one of these was your favorite. Or if you have a different favorite, please let us know in the comments just so that we can get some more inspiration. And maybe I can even make another video like this if looking at these examples together are helpful. So if you did find this helpful, please go ahead and subscribe to the channel because there's a lot more e-learning content to come. And if you thumbs up the video, it will just help get more eyes on it. So I appreciate you all. Thank you again for making it to the end here. And I will see you in the next video. Transcribed by https://otter.ai