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Lesson information:

As you read the information below, look out for these learning points:

• Be mindful of your audience of learners when considering how to phrase responses.
• Build in options that feel substantively different from each other to a learner
• Give the learner realistic mistakes, but don’t force them into mistakes!

The Do’s and Don’ts of Learner Decisions:

→ Learner Decisions are the learner’s chance to practice their skills and change the course of the conversation. Giving your learner realistic, meaningful choices will help them to transfer their new conversational skills to a real world context.

✔ DO

DO - Limit individual decisions to about 150 characters or less.

❌ DON’T

DON’T - Have long blocks of text for the learner to speak.

• Remember - they will be evaluating choices, and the longer they have to spend reading, the more the realism and immersion are being lost
• Additionally, if your desired learner response is very long, it probably has multiple skills in play, which could be measured more accurately if one long decisions was split in two

DO - Give the learner realistic mistakes.

• If poor choices are overly obvious, your learner likely won’t choose them.
• When possible, work with subject matter experts or your target learners to understand common mistakes.

DON’T - Give the learner a choice that is so exaggerated or offensive that few people would use it.

• It won’t challenge the learner’s abilities, and the learner may become bored if all answers are easy to choose among.

DO - Give the learner choices that are specific to the experience and goals you have given them for this conversation.

DON’T - Give the learner a choice that requires specialized knowledge that you have not provided for them.

• Ex. If your target learner audience aren’t mechanics, don’t have them speak details about repairing a car. This can lead to anxiety, as the learner questions whether or not this is true.

DO - Align learner responses to the role you have given them to play and the situation they find themselves in.

• A manager would speak to an employee differently than they would speak to their best friend

DON’T - Give the learner decisions that reflect an overly specific background (for example, referencing, “my sister,” etc).

• If the learner doesn’t know all the details of this backstory and/ or doesn’t relate to it, it could detract from the immersion and realism.

DO - Be mindful of your audience of learners when considering how to phrase responses.

• Try to use words that will be commonly recognizable to your audience and easy for them to pronounce.

DON’T - Use highly technical language when writing for a novice audience or use overly simplified language, which could bore an audience of advanced learners.

DO - Read your learner decisions aloud and consider:

• Does this option make sense as a response to all dialogue nodes that lead to this point?
• Does the dialogue node attached to each option make sense in relation to it?
• Does this sound realistic and natural to say?
• Is this easy for a user to speak aloud?

DON’T - Skip making sure all dialogue and decisions make sense together

• Rely on your learner memorizing a complicated script.
• The end goal is for your learner to master specific soft skills, which are transferable to many different contexts.
• You can create decision options that support this goal by phrasing options in a way that feels natural for your learner.

DO - Build in decisions that allow your learner to recover from a misstep

• Sometimes adding something as simple as, “I’m sorry, I misspoke. Let me restate…” can be enough to get things back on track.
• If your learner can practice how to recover from mistakes in a safe place, they will be better equipped to do that in the real world.

DON’T - “Punish” your learner for the same mistake twice, or force them to say the wrong thing by only providing one option. No one likes the feeling of being forced to fail!

DO - Build in options that feel substantively different from each other to a learner.

• If the only variations are minor changes in phrasing, learners may struggle to grasp the subtle differences, and might feel like it’s a “gotcha!” situation.

DON’T - Have three variations of the exact same statement.

• If you asked fifty learners how to respond to a statement, you would likely get close to fifty different responses. Your own learner decision options should reflect this.

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Level 3 - Lesson 3: Learner Decisions

Level 3 - Lesson 3: Learner Decisions

Completed

…and then go to the next Lesson! 💪

Level 3 - Lesson 4: Creating the Best Path

Level 3 - Lesson 4: Creating the Best Path

Completed