In this week’s post, Dave Correale, Senior Instructional Designer at NXLevel Solutions, discusses the benefits of using games to reinforce key compliance concepts and make training more engaging.
Imagine you’ve been given a 30-minute slot at an upcoming sales meeting. You’d really like to use the time to reinforce your company’s privacy principles, but you don’t want to just present a boring slide presentation. You know a game would be more fun, but would it be effective? How do you build a game around privacy principles, anyway? Besides, you’re not sure you even have the time or resources to build an effective game.
Let’s explore the first question: Would it be effective? While some of the more ambitious claims surrounding game-based learning are not yet substantiated by research, there is strong evidence that games can increase learner motivation and engagement, critical factors in the success of any learning program.
But how do you build an effective learning game around a topic like privacy? One mistake some people make when implementing a training game is they focus too much on the game and not enough on the objectives. Games are not a panacea. A game will likely not be effective for learning if it is not designed to meet specific instructional objectives. And just because a game is effective for one set of learners, in one specific circumstance, it not necessarily be effective for all learners in all circumstances. Just because you are using a game for learning, you cannot ignore valid instructional design principles and practices.
Fortunately, there are many types of games to meet many different types of learning objectives in a variety of circumstances. The level of participation itself can be diverse: games can involve teams or individuals playfully competing against each other in real time, or they can involve single players whose only competition is the game itself.
Let’s return to your 30-minute slot at a fictional sales meeting. Your goal is to reinforce learning on a topic your learners should already be familiar with. You could have employee teams play against each other in a “Jeopardy-style” contest. We’ve all seen the actual Jeopardy!® board – there’s room there to deliver a lot of content. But instead of bullet points, you’re leveraging familiar game show mechanics to raise curiosity among the learners and harness their competitive instincts. You can also build deeper connections between your employees and engage virtual employees in something more than just polling questions.
Single-player games also afford a number of possibilities. Perhaps your company is concerned with the number of recent settlements involving speaker programs. Players could work their way through an unfolding speaker program scenario where they need to engage with the speaker before the program and then respond to situations that arise during the speaker’s presentation. As they respond to each situation, the game moves forward, learners see the consequences of their decisions, and important lessons are learned or reinforced.
Finally, what about the time and resources required to design and develop an effective game? This is why PharmaCertify’s library of learning games is a good fit for ethics and compliance teams. Our collection of prebuilt games, which includes the only official Jeopardy!® game available, are easily customized to help you increase learner engagement and meet your learning objectives while requiring a fraction of the time and cost required to build a game from scratch. Contact Dan O’Connor at doconnor@pharmaceritfy.com to see a demo and start planning your next compliance training success story.
And look for additional posts in the future that continue to discuss how game-based learning solutions can help you reduce compliance risk and strengthen your culture of ethics.
Thanks for reading!
David Correale, Senior Instructional Designer, NXLevel Solutions