Simulations and the Future of Learning: An Innovative (and Perhaps Revolutionary) Approach to E‐learning

Citation

Thomas, S. (2004), "Simulations and the Future of Learning: An Innovative (and Perhaps Revolutionary) Approach to E‐learning", On the Horizon, Vol. 12 No. 1, pp. 45-51. https://doi.org/10.1108/10748120410540508

Simulation insubordination: how simulation games are revolutionising e‐learning

Simulations and the future of learning

If you were given the task of hiring someone to monitor the reactor at your nuclear power station (we are speaking hypothetically, of course) you would probably ensure that they had had hands‐on training in a simulator (among a whole host of other things) before they assumed their post. A nuclear disaster is, after all, something we would all like to avoid. The irony is that while we can readily see the benefit of using simulations to train people who deal in matters of life and death – doctors, pilots, bomb disposal experts – we are less able to see the benefit of using simulations to teach content that has traditionally been classroom fare. Yet, it is this content that has a profound effect on our day‐to‐day lives. This is the concept that is at the core of Aldrich's book Simulations and the Future of Learning: An Innovative (and Perhaps Revolutionary Approach to E‐learning).

If you have been around long enough to weather the rise and fall of virtual reality, then perhaps you will take any book title that has the word revolution in it with a grain of salt.

Luckily, the revolution Aldrich is proposing is much more tempting than the prospect of appearing in public wearing a head‐mounted display.

In fact, Aldrich is such a believable anarchist, you will find it easy to sign up as a revolutionary. You will believe that you can make profound changes to the learning environments under your care, because he will show you how he has done it himself. And along the way you will gain the confidence to think that perhaps you too could be instrumental in developing new genres of e‐learning.

Simulations and the Future of Learning relives the trials and tribulations Aldrich faced as lead designer for Virtual Leader, a leadership simulation that lets players experience leadership by managing bots (characters) in six different types of corporate meetings.

The problem with e‐learning

When e‐learning guru Clark Aldrich, turned in his whiteboard markers and left his position as research director for the Gartner Group in 2000, it was not without a slight amount of trepidation.

Things had got awkward. Aldrich was at the point where he could no longer be an enthusiastic spokesperson for an industry he knew was flawed. There were hundreds of thousands of e‐learning courses on offer; that was precisely the problem. Organisations were choosing suppliers of e‐learning content based on the volume of courses they could deliver, rather the quality of courses they could offer:

The shortsightedness of most e‐Learning buyers caused the equivalent of the arms race within the vendor market. They all began bulking up on content, building or purchasing titles as fast as they could. Vendors talked about hundreds or thousands of courses as being a good thing. Having fifty or sixty courses was considered competitively insufficient … (p. 35).

Aldrich attributed the e‐learning decline to a number of factors. The central of which was the mentality that e‐learning was an investment that could be easily quantified:

“I was asked a lot of great questions, but also a few goofy ones,” says Aldrich. “One of my favorites was “What is the ‘return on investment’ (ROI) of e‐Learning?” “Thirty seven point two percent,” I would reply jokingly. “Could you send that study to me?” they would quickly ask, desperately, always surprising me, as if grabbing onto my answer like a life preserver, and I would have to mumble an apology (p. 31).

Aldrich watched as innovations in technology only served to make e‐learning worse. For many organisations, e‐learning became pre‐reading. “Innovations” like synchronous e‐learning “eroded many of the early benefits of e‐Learning including scalability and automation” (p. 35) and so‐called “blended models, where classrooms and e‐Learning were used together, were just becoming popular because self‐paced e‐Learning content failed to be sufficiently useful” (p. 36).

Aldrich wrote about the e‐learning market seven days a week. He meticulously evaluated content that vendors provided, looking at value and credibility. In his spare time he played the role of visionary, writing research notes to help anyone who was considering being more ambitious. “I talked about simulations, computer games and the lessons that could be learned”(p. 36). But there were no takers. Aldrich could see what needed to be done – someone needed to do things differently, someone needed to create a truly engaging, interactive, effective e‐learning program. But he could not find anyone to do it. “I don't think I motivated anyone to begin a simulation project, nor could I find anything existing that met my own criteria” (p. 36).

Aldrich “knew the existing e‐Learning market inside and out.” He “could draw market diagrams on a whiteboard in multicolour.” But, he could no longer deny it. The foundation of e‐learning was rotten to the core. So, he left Gartner and set out on his own, with his reason for existing wonderfully clear: he was going “to produce a single example of fabulous content that role modeled a new approach to building and using e‐Learning” (p. 37).

The beginning

Equipped with a lot of heart and a rolodex of contacts, Aldrich set out to achieve his dream. He was going to simulate the topic of leadership.

Leadership is a key skill needed by any organisation and one which he was quizzed on time and time again when he was a Gartner analyst: “‘We tried this and that, Covey and Kotter, and nothing works,’ clients would tell me. ‘The stuff is too confusing, too high level, too academic. There are too many charts that don't make any sense’” (p. 38).

But, while he knew what needed to be done he had no idea how he was going to go about doing it: “Not only did I not have any answers to the tough questions, but I didn't even know what the tough questions were.”

The problem with experts

So he began where anyone else would: with the experts. After all, when dealing with the subject of leadership it only makes sense to find a few leaders to give you a hand.

But Aldrich could not find any experts to help him. It is not that there were not experts around. It is just that the experts were “in the business of producing linear content – be it a speech, a book, or a lecture series … Getting any of them to think of content non‐linearly would be a huge undertaking, possibly impossible … They had some white papers that could be pre‐reading, so players could read fifteen pages if they made the same mistake twice” (p. 42).

Aldrich asked the experts probing questions, and they shrugged their shoulders: If the experts accepted “The Simulation Way, they would have to accept the fact they were no longer experts. And that would mean no huge fees” (p. 42).

Aldrich quickly discovered that there were few benefits to be gained from involving experts at all. “For most vendors, the simple act of procuring a brand name took months. Further, their involvement easily cost (in both time and money) 15 percent or more of the entire project's budget … The content they provided tended to be war stories or notes from upcoming books and speeches. They routinely added months to development time. Most changes tended to be egocentric” (p. 43).

His own brand of leadership

Anyone familiar with the canon of leadership theory will find Aldrich's definition of what makes a leader slightly foreign.

That is because he invented it.

Making a simulation of a system – for example, a flight simulator – is a relatively straightforward task: you simply model controls and functionality. Modelling a complex concept, like leadership, is considerably more difficult.

In order to create a leadership simulation, Aldrich first had to figure out how to define leadership in a way that would lend itself to being modelled in a simulation. He undertook a massive research campaign: “If we were to build a leadership simulation, we needed to start from scratch,” says Aldrich. “Our first step was to locust‐like devour every scrap of leadership content we could find” (p. 45).

Rules, rules and more rules

To make sense of the volume of material his team uncovered, Aldrich wrote leadership “rules” that basically outlined how a computer might view a leadership situation and what input and output it would need to react. “We didn't know whether it was a waste of time, but we hoped it would help us organize and focus,” he says. “In the end we wrote more than one hundred of these [rules]. They ended up forming the deep logical structure for Virtual Leader's artificial intelligence” (p. 50).

In the forward of Simulations and the Future of Learning, Gery states:

I learned more about leadership by reading about the simulation than I have in thirty‐five years of management training programs and book reading. These are serious accomplishments for what I expected to be a technical book.

As Aldrich outlines his leadership rules, you begin to see what Gery means. What is most interesting about the rules is that he does not just state a principle – “When it is time to create and maintain an environment conducive to work, increase tension” – he outlines what the principle actually means:

When … not much effort or attention is being expended, there is no discipline, there is an insistence of focusing on easy fixes, and people come in late; You should … introduce provocative, contentious, controversial, challenging ideas, raise your voice, attack slackers, get personal, and make multiple quick attacks. If you do … you can become the enemy. But if you don't … work will not get done and complacency and a tendency to conduct business as usual will set in (p. 53).

In the book, Aldrich outlines only 12 of these rules. And as you read them you get the sense you would not only like to read through all 100 of them, but you would actually like to try them out as well, to see how they would play out if you were actually in the role of a leader. It is at this point that the genius of what Aldrich has done becomes crystal clear: Virtual Leader allows you to do just that.

But even though Aldrich and his team had put together a substantive collection of the rules of leadership – and been able to define four categories of skills required to lead, namely, power skills (e.g. negotiating), idea skills (e.g. brainstorming), tension skills (e.g. stress management), and work skills (e.g. time management) – the collection did not bring them any closer to charting out Virtual Leader's “gameplay.” An “aha moment” came when a member of one of their focus groups said: “So leadership tells me when to use my other skills.”

It became clear to Aldrich, that the role of Virtual Leader was going to have to be to teach people when and how to use these four sets of skills – skills that, in most cases, they already had. They would have to learn how to gain power, generate ideas, and moderate tension, all while working with the group they were leading.

Still, Aldrich had to justify the validity of reinventing the wheel: “People had been studying leadership for centuries. Who were we to challenge everyone's prevailing views? Who were we to redefine a concept this fundamental? And if our simple view of this was so true‐to‐life, why hadn't someone else come up with it?” (p. 83).

The short answer, Aldrich explains, is that people had already come up with it:

If you looked over almost any of the twelve thousand books on leadership, they contained our [power‐ideas‐tension‐work framework]. But because the experts were thinking linearly, the simplicity and depth of this model was never too apparent, nor explored very deeply. Armed with our linear content, our cyclical content, and now our systems content, we had the framework we needed (p. 83).

How to make a simulation: design principles

Buried deep in the pages of Aldrich's book are the design principles that guide the evolution he is proposing. These design gems include such concepts as simulations should not feature a single system, but a series of subsystems. Simulations should leverage the power of modularity. Simulations should not be slaves to reality, but, instead, be realistic interpretations of the world we live in.

Subsystems

Worlds are simulated by allowing different systems to interact. As Warren Spector, producer of the massively successful Deus Ex, pointed out in a conversation with Aldrich: “What you want to do is create a game that's built on a set of consistently applied rules that players can exploit however they want … In other words, rather than crafting single‐solution puzzles, create rules that describe how objects interact with one another (for example, water puts out fire …) and turn players loose – you want to simulate a world rather than emulate specific experiences” (p. 97).

In order to create these types of situations, you have to make systems that can talk to each other. Systems are able to communicate when they share a common goal. Tom Meigs, an independent game consultant who has worked for Walt Disney Company, THQ and others, calls this the game's heartbeat. “No doubt, this heartbeat will suffer many palpitations and skipped beats,” says Meigs. “Your game's heartbeat should be kept in mind to help guide the thousands of decisions that will be posed… If you forget about a game's heartbeat, the game can grow into a surly five‐headed beast almost overnight” (Meigs, 2003).

Getting a game's heart to beat is, without question, a formidable task; however, it is helped by the fact that there exists genre‐specific techniques game designers can use for typical game processes such as pathfinding and collision detection.

Unfortunately, generic components were not a luxury that Aldrich benefited from. Designing computer games that feature movement and shooting and physical exploration of game space was one thing, designing systems that reflected something as philosophically complex as leadership theory was something completely different. All the subsystems needed to reflect and enrich the learning of leadership. There were no genre‐specific techniques for Aldrich to fall back on, because the genre he was developing for did not exist.

The power of modularity

Another consideration that drove the development of Virtual Leader was even though it was intended to be used as an off‐the‐shelf simulation, all of its systems needed to be easy to customise.

This meant that everything needed to be modular. Virtual Leader's design team wanted to be able to offer to the world of leadership what Star Wars's Jedi Outcast game offered to its players: “a player battles against thousands of … villainous storm troupers across twenty‐five huge levels and forty hours of game play. But by switching out just one file with another, every storm trooper on every level will look different, talk differently, and even behave differently” (p. 99).

Because it had a modular architecture, Virtual Leader was extensible. Not to mention it offered learners endless opportunities for customisation and offered organisations, whether they were pharmaceutical companies or non‐profit fundraisers, the chance to personalise their leadership training programs. An organisation could make one change and watch it cascade through the entire simulation. They could add new characters, change the voices of characters, or add and remove dialogue.

Role‐playing phobia

Admittedly, Aldrich's readership will not be 100 per cent appreciative of his entire gamut of design principles, especially supporters of educational role‐play and massively multiplayer online role‐playing games (MMORPGs).

Aldrich writes, “Many assume a multi‐player educational simulation would be a better learning experience than a single player one. They assume that other people participating would make the simulation more realistic, more subtle, and of higher value. Mostly, they assume wrong” (p. 100).

Aldrich's dismissal is understandable, but shortsighted. Yes, roleplaying environments might be highly public; yes, players might not act “normally”; yes, the logistics of getting people to meet at the same time might be hugely expensive and time consuming. But they also might not. Ignoring the benefits of community gameplay (and community learning) by designing all future simulations as single player endeavours undermines the revolution that Aldrich is leading.

Aldrich is right when he points out that real people do have failings when they play the role of opponent. They “act erractically.” They get tired, frustrated, and bored. But they can also undertake a complexity of behaviour that AI cannot even come close to emulating. Just as there is value in designing simulations that put learners in situations where they can repeat things over and over, ten, 20, 100 times; there is also value in putting learners in one‐off situations. Unscripted, complex trials that exploit the learning opportunities of social interactions.

Accuracy

The perpetual question asked of simulations is “How accurate do they have to be able to teach effectively?” This is referred to as the “issue of fidelity.” The overriding assumption is the more realistic simulations are the better the learning experience will be. In other words, we assume that a high level of fidelity is needed to allow learning transfer to occur. Game designers are incorporating increasingly complex levels of realism into their art forms, continually experimenting with graphical techniques that ensure, for instance, virtual grass looks like real, live grass. The difficulty with realism though is that the closer you get to “actuality,” the easier it is for players to see the flaws. Players are more than familiar with the nuances of the world around them. Immersion – the holy grail educational designers and commercial game designers alike strive for – is easily disrupted by lighting or shadows that do not look quite right or discordant frame rates.

Simulations work better when they interpret reality. This requires designers to analyse the base learning required in any given learning situation, rather than blindly modelling real‐life. In other words, simulations need to be about the learning rather than about the simulation. For instance, MIST (www.mentice.com) is a simulation that teaches surgical skills. During development, designers drilled down to uncover the core learning required when carrying out key surgical techniques. Instead of replicating human tissue on screen, they ended up designing a simulation that saw learners manipulating basic geometric shapes – spheres and cubes among others – because this allowed learners to concentrate on the development of the key psychomotor skills required during surgery.

Can we be induced to abandon our penchant for perfect realism? Aldrich warns it might be wise to do so: “Given that people are part of the equation, in simulation design, perfection is not always as perfect as you might hope. Part of the goal of any simulation is to focus the end‐learner on a finite, not infinite, set of relationships. While the number of relationships will grow both as simulations become more powerful and as we become more used to learning from them, simulations will never reach the infinite subtlety of life, nor should they” (p. 103).

The animation system

The “bots,” the animated characters that feature in Virtual Leader's simulated meetings, were constructed from skeletal animations. “The models we built of all of the characters had working parts,” says Aldrich. “They had joints and bones … The nice thing about this approach is that the same animations could be used on all of the bots. (Well, almost all of the bots. We actually had to use different animations for male and female bots.) … This made it very easy to change a small animation in one place and have it be changed in all bots, in all meetings” (p. 123).

Virtual Leader used a state‐based framework to control the animations. And, while Aldrich points out that using a state‐based framework is “hardly ever interesting enough as the primary calculation engine for a simulation,” (p. 122) it is well‐suited to playing a supporting role. In total, the animation system had 15 states and, because Virtual Leader featured meeting room scenarios, these states included typical meeting room movements such as “sitting up to table, distance normal” and “leaning forward with pen in hand.” Further, each state had several animations associated with it: the bots listened, squirmed, and coughed.

How a bot shifted from state to state was dictated by probability. If the artificial intelligence system told the bot that it was nervous, there was a 10 per cent chance it would pick up a pen and start tapping, a 30 per cent chance it would stand up, and a 60 per cent chance it would continue doing whatever it was it was already doing.

While this flexibility gave the animations a healthy dose of unpredictability, it caused a few design issues, at least initially: “When we first finished the program, the animation system was not tuned well at all. The bots would stand up, then sit down, then lean forward, then lean back. They were exhausting to watch. They all looked as if they had just had about six double lattes” (p. 127).

As you make your way through Aldrich's case study, you get the sense that half the point of building simulations is the pure unadulterated joy that the process of building brings. Aldrich makes it clear that while discovery is powerful and rewarding and enlightening for the learner it is equally or more so for the creator, particularly when it reveals unplanned, yet positive, outcomes: “Do you realize,” one of Aldrich's team members asked him late one night, “that we will be presenting more information than a week‐long course on body‐language, and that's not even the point of the simulation?” (p. 126).

Suddenly, debugging a bot's animated quirks became a much more palatable exercise. It became even more worthwhile later, when body language turned out to be one of the simulation's major selling points.

Dialogue

When it comes to revolutions, a good healthy dose of fear is enough to spur any wilful recruit into action. On the other hand too fear much can cause catatonic paralysis. Aldrich's chapter on dialogue is not only terrifying, but it also gets dangerously close to scaring off anyone who might be interested in undertaking her very own simulation project.

Aldrich refers to dialogue as “the ultimate hurdle.” And for good reason. Computer games, which do so many things so well, are stuck in the Dark Ages when it comes to bringing to life the spoken word.

As game gurus Rollings and Adams (2003) point out in their book On Game Design, “unfortunately, in most games the dialogue is even cornier than 1970s television shows, and the acting is as bad or worse”.

The majority of games use dialogue judiciously – and relatively sparingly – to get their messages across, mostly during cutscenes or in the form of sound bites.

Aldrich provides valuable insight into the rationale behind this behaviour. Every word of dialogue is expensive, he says, both in terms of paying the voice talent to record the dialogue, and in terms of taking up space in the simulation. Dialogue simply has not got the attention it deserves because it is not cost‐effective for commercial developers to add it into their development models.

At first Aldrich thought it was going to be easy to create a satisfactory dialogue system. He started to become concerned when he began planning out the dialogue and realised that at minimum “satisfactory” entailed writing 420 quotes. Concern turned into panic when his 420 quotes increased to 630 and then skyrocketed into the thousands. When the number reached more than 3,000, enormity had become a reality:

The task of writing non‐linear dialogue turned out to be much harder than anyone, especially I, imagined … I was informed by my co‐workers that I approached this task with a bit of a bad attitude. I just wanted to get it over as fast as possible, which already didn't seem that fast (p. 140).

But as Aldrich laboured away, he had an epiphany, which translated into a positive behavioural change. He had been overlooking a “basic simulation truth”: Everything you put into a simulation, no matter how small, adds value.

“I'd originally looked at the dialogue system as a necessary evil, a low‐impact tool to advance the action,” says Aldrich. “As I started writing, I realised how much could be accomplished … I could define characters. I could make some characters sarcastic and others earnest. I could write some amusing lines … I could also role model some debates about big ideas. I could put in some inspirational and editorial comments” (p. 142).

What is more, because the dialogue system – like all of the simulation's other systems – was designed to be modified, it gives organisations using the game considerable control:

If an organisation does not like a line they can delete it outright. Virtual leader will automatically compensate for the line not being there. Or if an organisation wants to add some dialogue, Virtual Leader will automatically cycle it in and play it at the right time (p. 148).

Still, Aldrich says that Virtual Leader's dialogue is the single area where the simulation is most criticised. Some players want the freedom to choose exactly what they want to say by writing their own phrases or picking them from a list. Others say the dialogue sounds unnatural. Players eventually come to terms with the fact that the dialogue, while a “departure from reality,” is a design convention:

Part of our challenge is not just to reset expectations to prefer an interactive environment over a linear one, and not just to stress real‐time interactivity, but also to keep the audience focused on the learning objectives… The point of Virtual Leader is not to say the right thing. It is to focus the conversation the right way … we didn't want people to focus too carefully on what was said, but instead why it was said (p. 149).

Recruiting revolutionaries

The written word is an ideal weapon for the earnest revolutionary.

Sometimes books are like rocket launchers; they propel you forward with explosive force. Aldrich's book more closely resembles an impact grenade. You admire its untapped power, but know its force will not be realised until you have got enough smarts to pull the safety pin. There is a certain expectation that later on, down the road, the effect will be devastating.

The survival of e‐learning depends on mobilising a groundforce to take action. “So many groups assume that studying a problem will bring them closer to a solution, when so often it has the opposite effect of consuming vast resources without producing anything,” says Aldrich.

Aldrich proves that it is possible to produce effective, interactive e‐learning. He provides inspiration for anyone interested in taking up the challenge to forge new simulation genres.

Simulations and the Future of Learning is subversive writing at its finest. If you are already a believer in the power of games and simulations but have not been able to convince the people around that it is the way forward, leave this book under the nose of your most vocal opponent. After reading it, he will start recruiting the people you need for your next game simulation project.