Simulations teach timing and balance, something not possible through traditional classrooms, film, or books. They enable new types of educational experience that can be rigorously, effectively, and consistently deployed, increasing the power of any organization that uses them well.
Successful simulation deployments today, be it in corporations or academics, live, remote, or mixed, use up to four stages, or slates. Each slate has different, unique characteristics that have to be deliberately built into a program from both the creator and the implementer to ensure success.
And each slate builds on the other. They must come sequentially. Therefore while each can be compressed, and some programs will go further than others, none can be skipped over.
Slate One: Background - The Locker Room
The first slate involves traditional linear instruction. Students hear about the goals of the program, the models used, the time frame involved, and some background.
There is a range of options for this first slate, from traditional classroom, to virtual classrooms, to pre-canned, pre-recorded sessions. Much of the traditional instructional design applies here (and just here).
Learning in slate one is at a superficial, intellectual level. But if this slate is skipped, students will be disinterested in and confused about the simulation.
Slate Two: Introduction - The Shallow End of the Pool
The students are given explicit instructions, so-called “walk-throughs,” on how to successfully navigate the experience. Then they engage in a limited functionality version of the simulation.
The goal of the second slate is two fold.
First, it is to expose the student to the interface in a low-tension environment. This is more critical than it might first appear. While an interface for an application such as a web-based tool should be seamless, inviting the plea from the user, “don’t make me think,” a simulation (and especially one that teaches soft-skills), is presenting a new way of looking at a potentially familiar situation. This “new way of looking” requires new thought, is a critical part of the learning, and therefore, necessarily makes an end-user think.
Second, it is to allow the student to understand some of the key relationships of the simulation in isolation. They can experience a direct, one-to-one connection between certain causes and effects that will be less salient in the third slate.
Ideally, the second slate experiences are highly annotated. It is easy to see why things work, and why things don’t work. They should also be highly modular, allowing students to practice at their convenience, often in small chunks. Finally, they should show some simplified feedback after the session. If designed and built well, the simulation should not require an instructor at all during slate two.
Slate two teaches a little more comprehensively than slate one, including introducing a more visual and kinesthetic lens for looking at an issue. If this slate is skipped, students will be confused when they get to the full version of the simulation. Many early simulations, such as branching video and virtual products, go no further than this second slate.
Slate Three: Engagement - The Deep End of the Pool
The third slate represents the steepest part of the learning curve. Students encounter increasingly complex situations and receive increasingly detailed and subtle feedback, while they are engaging a simulation, and more complex data in the review period just afterwards. While the introductions into each scenario may be linear, the gameplay most assuredly is not.
While the slate two experiences isolated the various relationships, slate three combines them in increasingly subtle and complex ways.
Slate three experiences are often engaged in real-time. There is no longer one way of doing anything. There is no longer “the answer,” just out of reach. Help files are less direct. Frustrated users will (and should) often go back to linear material from slate one. Everyone will end up engaging the simulation differently.
Slate three is often more successful if people learn in groups. Putting two or three people per simulation forces one to observe, building teamwork, exposing each to alternative approaches, and decreasing learning time. Chat rooms can be used if the students are not co-located.
Unlike, say, computer games, instructors can also add significant value at this point. This difference comes from at least two reasons. The first is that simulations are not necessarily fun and entertaining, like the game counterparts (although fun is often a good thing, depending on the topic area). Second, what is learned has to be applied in a real world situation. While pretend pilots might learn how to use Microsoft Flight Simulator on their own, we would not want our real pilot to use that alone. Those learning supply chain management need to really know it.
Most of instructors’ value in this slate comes from one-on-one contact with the students. They truly go from being presenters to coaches. This is more effective live, but with distance learning technologies, the coaching can also be done remotely, even asynchronously.
They will spend some time handholding, helping on the technical or interface issues. Hopefully, most of these have been resolved in the second slate.
They will spend a lot of time providing customized help, relying on their own instincts how much support to give a participant. The instructor might want to communicate to the student not to hurry through as fast as they can, but to try new approaches and to take risks, for example. In many cases they will make the real time feedback and the post-experience reviews more meaningful to the student.
This second role of enabling the instructor to give support requires both new skills and design consideration. In slate three simulations, the program must contain visualization that captures the flow of a simulation experience, and can present it at a glance. That way, if a student is engaged for twenty minutes, the teacher can, in a few moments, get a feel for how the experience progressed, in order to provide meaningful feedback. Or if asynchronously, then instructor could review some charts at their convenience and email back some observations and advice.
Finally, slate three is more effective if it include established debriefings, outside of the immediate review session of the simulation. Participants stop playing and formally reflect on their experiences. Students may discuss specific situations, voice their approval or vent their objections with the characters or conditions in the simulation (i.e. "If that person were in my organization, I would fire them immediately"). It can let people connect their learning to the real world. This might be done individually, in small groups, or with the entire group, depending on the class topology.
In slate three, the learning is emotional, and becomes, with practice, intuitive. If this slate is skipped, students will get some of the value from the simulation, but it will take longer, require more discipline, and the learning might be incomplete. Any rigorous formal assessments using the simulation will most likely happen here.
Slate Four: Practice - Free Swim
The fourth, final slate is un-chaperoned engagement. The students spend their time practicing their skills, pushing the envelope of the experience. Spending at least three or four hours on the simulator is necessary for a student to work the skills to an intuitive level.
Slate four requires ongoing access to the simulation, either via the Internet for lower-fidelity simulations, or through a centralized lab or distributed through a medium including CD-ROMs for robust simulations.
Some organizations may have ongoing contests for high-scores here. And some students endwill modify the parameters, potentially building entirely new scenarios, adding another intellectual layer of knowledge on top of the developed intuition.
Conclusion
These four steps can take just one or two days if a group is in a hurry. More likely, this will happen over a week, or even over months. Understanding the different slates is key for both simulation designers and implementers, academic and enterprise.
Whether part of lab-based, blended, or remote learning experience, simulations take more work, and they result in exponentially better results. They add more steps to the process, but each step is critical to the successful education, not just the implementation of the simulation. These approaches have evolved from the early physical interface simulations, such as with flight simulators or complex machinery controls, to complex "soft-skills" such as leadership. The question will soon not be, why use simulations, but why would you expect courses to work without simulations?