Why Role Plays are the Best Bet for Effective Sales Training

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Knowing is not enough; we must apply. Wishing is not enough; we must do.”
– Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

How right on point Von Goethe is. Selling has never been simple or straightforward. All the prospects have unique needs, personalities, buying motivations; which means no single sales script or strategy will work for all. So, no matter how many lessons or books a salesperson can cram, they can never learn the true skill, unless they practice in the field.

And that’s what makes sales training so hard to put into practice. But there’s a solution – role plays. Role-play training exercises have long been recognized as a powerful training tool in sales. Role plays are a proven way to boost the performance of sales teams by enhancing their confidence in new product features and benefits and how to handle objections in a safe environment.

When you give your new sales hires different role-playing scenarios, you’re helping them develop their conflict resolution skills, build empathy, handle rejections, and learn to perform under pressure. They also learn how to improvise under different scenarios.

Role play scenarios in sales

In the sales profession, there are broadly four main scenarios, or you can say, customers, a salesperson will encounter.

1. Complaining or argumentative customer

This is a must-have scenario in any of your role play training exercises. A customer can be angry for a host of reasons – unsatisfactory service, delay in refund, defective product, etc. And as a salesperson, you can’t escape such customers and will have to deal with them as no one wants unhappy customers. The role play exercises must involve a good amount of info about products as well as offers, campaigns in running, so the sales reps can counter customers’ arguments positively and effectively.

2. Undecided customer

Sometimes, even after giving it your best shot, few customers will always be undecided. The objections could be focused on features, service, or pricing. In some situations, the customer actually likes the product but is not in a position to authorize the purchase. Role play exercises in this scenario must be about how sales reps can do their homework right. You must discuss how your business is validating leads and how to properly categorize leads in their proper categories.

3. Nitty-gritty customer

This type of customer is detail-oriented and will do their own thorough research before making a purchase. Role play exercises to handle such customers must focus on specific questions that’d need further education. Such exercises would also help your reps deal with the unknown, and at the same time, you can assess your reps’ knowledge about the brand and its products.

4. Tech-savvy customer

Such customers are extremely tech-savvy and are one step ahead of the sales reps when it comes to products, features, and functionalities. You might think that you have covered all your bases about your business and that of the competitors. But there’ll always be one tiny detail that you’d miss out. Role play exercises for such customers would involve in-depth scenarios about the products, including even the tiniest, unnoticeable details. Such exercises would force your reps to think out of the box.

How to create effective role-playing scenarios?

Once you know the different types of customers you encounter in your business, you can chalk out a strategy to create effective role play scenarios that will help your sales teams to come out on top of their game.

Here are some tips that you can use to make the role plays effective:

  • Use a script: It’s ok to let your sales teams use a script while hashing out exercises. It’d enhance their confidence levels and give them fair opportunities to succeed in a role. Once they are comfortable enough, they will switch to improvisation during the exercises.
  • Rejection happens: It’s very important to help your sales reps understand that rejection is a part of the game and they must not take it personally. Ideate some scenarios with rejection to enable reps to handle it better. And share your stories with your team; it would humanize rejections.
  • Take notes: The point of an effective role play scenario is to not interrupt your reps during the exercise. You must take notes and allow the reps to steer the conversation on their own. This helps them to think on their feet.
  • Test listening skills: Listening is an extremely important skill every salesperson must-have. In the role play exercises, interject some false information about your products or services to test your reps’ listening skills. Their response can help you to coach them better.
  • Negotiation scenarios: Most of the customers want a good bargain and will ask for it. Develop negotiation skills in your reps through role play scenarios by creating situations where buyers would deliberately ask for a lower price based on competitor pricing or budget. You can leverage artificial intelligence to evaluate such role plays because it identifies the number of filler words used, tone, and confidence, which are typically more difficult to provide feedback on without concrete data.

Role plays for effective sales training

Role plays encourage sales reps to think more critically about the products and services and to see situations from a different perspective. If done right, role plays can motivate reps in a fun and engaging way. But for that to happen, role plays should be content-focused, match the business objectives, and be relevant to real-world situations.

However, creating role plays for online sales training needs more than understanding real-life scenarios and business objectives. Especially if you are building more than one-off custom sales training module, you need templates to streamline the development process and create a consistent learning experience. Organizations widely deploy our interactive templates for role plays to create business simulations and branching scenarios really fast and affordable. They are customizable and can be used for any industry and audience.

We work through a compelling storytelling technique and use several motion graphics and talking head videos to make your role plays effective and boost engagement and performance. There is no need to provide boring digital catalogs or customary page-turner sales training courses when you can offer interactive role plays that can be accessed remotely across devices. Talk to us if you want to refresh your sales training program.

 This article was first published on eLearning Industry.  

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Personalized Learning: 4 Key Takeaways from SHAPE Education Event

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On 1 March 2022, our CEO Vivek Agarwal participated in a session on What do you mean ‘personalised learning’? that explored the value personalization can bring to learning, both in terms of an individual’s learning journey and on education as a whole.

SHAPE Education, a joint initiative from Cambridge University Press and Cambridge Business School, organized it as part of its series of bite-size SHAPE Live events spotlighting key challenges and opportunities in the EdTech sector. Rosina Dorelli, founder and director of DaVinci Life Skills, a Cambridge-based organization, was the other speaker who spoke at this event.

Here’s a quick recap of four key takeaways from this event

1. Extensive data analysis with a combination of data points is key

Advanced and systematic data collection techniques through AI have enabled faster dissemination of insights. However, the biggest challenge is gauging what the learner wants to do, which isn’t always easy. Liqvid uses extensive statistics – deep math, linear equations, clustering – to create forecasting for personalization of the learning paths. Extensive data analysis is going to be the key.

2. Learning has an emotional tangent

Decision-making is not all raw data; it’s also cognitive. Vivek recalled the example of his daughter picking up things quickly when she’s more inclined or in a good mood. Emotions clearly play a big part. The eLearning design must factor in that.

3. Curriculum must be a mix of tech and socio-emotional attributes

The one-size-fits-all model doesn’t work. The question is, does our current education system really prepare students with all the skills that they need in life? DaVinci Life Skills is building a showcase model for the future of education based on Biophilic design, which focuses on educating learners creatively, ethically, and sustainably.

4. Dictatorship in education must go

There is a lot of dictatorship in education right now. The question is, what is enough for personalization – give the learners what we think is best for them or entrust them with a sense of control over their learning? Rosina feels a sense of self-motivation is very important. Vivek gave an interesting example of a project where they are leveraging technology to personalize learning by giving students different sets of automated questions for home assignments based on the assessment done by teachers.

Poll Results and Audience Questions

Earlier in the event, a poll was conducted to ask the attendees which types of data they think are most important for personalizing learning. Just over a quarter of respondents picked previous learning, interests, and preferences, followed by confidence scores/self-evaluation as important data points for personalizing learning.

Vivek and Rosina shared their perspectives on a range of interesting questions. Here are two that stood out to us:

Why are some learners are more engaged than others?

To the question of whether there is evidence of the data suggesting why some learners are more engaged than others, Vivek shared Liqvid’s approach, which is to look at the course usage patterns, create a hypothesis, and test it on data. Once the pilot is successful, we expand the data pool and based on the feedback, deploy solutions at scale. So, there is plenty of evidence for achieving a learning model with a high level of engagement.

Should the learners be given what they prefer, or should it be what they need?

Rosina feels completely democratizing learning for students right now won’t be the right way as it’d create a lot of pressure on students as well as teachers. She believes schools must allow students to fail so and then get back up again to achieve that sense of self-achievement.

Summing up

The event concluded with the question on the problem that both speakers haven’t been able to solve yet and what help they would need in order to do so. Rosina said her priority is the model of teacher training they are pursuing right now to empower students to create their own learning objectives for effective personalized learning while, Vivek says the next big challenge would obviously be ensuring how each learner can leverage technology to learn the way they like!

Watch the complete recording for more insights!

BONUS READ: Why is personalized learning so critical today, and how does AI help create personalized learning experiences.

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How is AI Transforming eLearning Beyond the Usual Suspects – Personalized and Language Learning?

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Artificial intelligence (AI) has become a staple not only in cloud computing but in eLearning, too. The reasons are obvious – it can be trained on several functions, saves time and money, build more efficient learning, and provide a deeper level of personalization for learners. Even the numbers back it – per a research report, the AI market is forecasted to reach $190.61 billion by 2025, out of which the eLearning market will surpass $6 billion by 2024! 

But beyond the usual suspects of personalized learning and language learning, AI has a lot to offer in the eLearning industry. Let’s explore other areas where AI is revolutionizing eLearning.

1. Content Analytics

AI-driven content analytics significantly optimizes learning solutions for off-the-shelf eLearning content providers and digital learning content publishers. Leveraging the “what works and what doesn’t” information, they can proactively build course catalogs to address the market demands and learners’ challenges. For educators and course creators, AI helps not just create and manage their eLearning content, but also gain important insights into learner progress and understanding through powerful data sets and models.

2. Virtual Facilitators

AI will, one day, replace an actual instructor with a robot. We already see virtual human mentors and facilitators that can think and act like humans. AI makes it possible via the “touchless technology” or “gesture recognition technology,” which lends human-like abilities to these virtual facilitators to respond or act naturally on verbal and nonverbal cues. Future smart learning environments and platforms will increasingly use AI to create realistic virtual characters and social interactions through augmented reality. Virtual facilitators could be strategically used to optimize human instructors’ time and involvement in the teaching or training process.

3. Intelligent Tutors

They sound the same as virtual facilitators, but they aren’t. AI is increasingly being used in eLearning to tutor a learner based on their difficulties beyond just condensing a lecture into flashcards and smart study guides. For instance, “SHERLOCK,” an intelligent tutoring system, is being used to teach air force technicians to diagnose electrical system problems in aircraft. UCLA has developed intelligent tutoring systems – avatar-based training modules – to train military personnel. In the future, these tutors will be able to help learners with anything and can also adapt to a wide variety of learning styles.

4. Course Creation

Using AI in eLearning will make the complete course creation process simpler and faster. For instance, AI can help in automatic translation and localization to offer more speed and efficiency by developing multi-language content for global companies, or for remote teams that speak different languages.

5. Chatbots and Virtual Assistants

With AI, educators can perform assessments faster and process inquiries in real-time to accelerate the learning process and enhance engagement. The best example is that of a chatbot or a virtual assistant, which can “decide” what question to ask learners based on their previous answers and jump to a higher level when the learners consistently enter the correct answers. Chatbots and virtual assistants can help both learners and instructors by answering questions that might otherwise have been sent directly to the instructor, or by helping students navigate course material in a friendlier way.

6. Accessibility Experiences

It’s perhaps the most important capability of AI, but less talked about. AI is revolutionizing the accessibility experiences for learners. For instance, Microsoft developed a free app called “Seeing AI” to leverage the power of AI to narrate to the blind by reading text, recognizing products, describing scenes, currencies, and the person standing in front of you, including their emotions. When more content creators add such apps to their learning courses, it will automatically increase collaboration and facilitate social learning. And not just blind; AI can also act as a virtual assistant responding to voice commands, to individuals who deal with mobility issues.

Paving New Pathways

The EdTech industry has seen solutions with AI components in the last few years. However, the adoption has been slow and unmatched to its boundless potential. The AI tools used in the education sector positively affect students, teachers, and schools by improving the accessibility of quality education. We will continue to see it gain a foothold in all areas of digital learning.

AI can seem complicated, but it’s more accessible than you think. Liqvid can help you better understand the potential applications of AI within your unique business process and recommend ways to utilize this game-changing feature to ensure your training is engaging and successful. AI-powered learning is the future. Embrace it to make it your competitive advantage. Contact us!

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How Role Plays Help in Extended Enterprise Training

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People empowered by technology are the biggest asset for businesses to compete in today’s cut-throat world. And businesses aren’t stopping at hiring the best talent and investing in their training; they are also broadening their focus to include those in the “extended enterprise.” These external stakeholders, who can play a pivotal role in a business’s success, include affiliates, franchisees, vendors, consultants, business partners, even customers.

Businesses realize that to deliver enhanced customer experiences, helping their extended enterprises become more effective is as important as building solid relationships. And that’s why it’s critical to invest in extended enterprise training.

This goes back years. Japanese auto manufacturers famously helped their suppliers be more effective back in 1993 by sharing their approaches to success and collaborating with them to make better products and cars. Big tech companies like Salesforce, Microsoft, Amazon run their own “partner programs.” The list is endless.

Extended enterprise training is a “must-have” for the huge benefits they bring. Better revenue, strengthened brand, reduced risk, and improved business processes are just a few, but significant ones. It makes sense that those businesses are constantly looking out for ways to make their extended enterprise training efficient. And role plays have emerged as one of the most effective modes of doing so.

How to use role plays effectively in extended enterprise training?

Role plays are an effective method of training for better retention and performance. Let’s understand how you can implement role plays as part of your extended enterprise training.

Product training: You can’t expect to engage the extended enterprise teams with the same old interactive manuals, videos and linear eLearning courses. Train them on product features and benefits through complex branching scenarios revealing information on each path. Demonstrate the functionalities through an interactive mascot or a guide. Build gradual curiosity in learners prompting them to ask questions and learn in-depth. 

Sales training: Identify the areas where sales teams are likely to face challenges and build role plays to equip them to handle those sales scenarios. Digital role plays are excellent for practicing the elevator pitch, demonstrating products and solutions, fielding typical customer objections, and learning negotiations in a safe environment. Strategically use digital role plays to prepare sales teams to face classroom practice sessions with sales managers or leaders.

Customer support training: No one benefits from role plays based training than people in customer support roles. Understand the profiles of the customers, their expected behaviors, and possible concerns that your extended enterprise teams might face and create role plays with branching scenarios for each customer profile. Prepare them to keep calm while interacting with customers in all situations. Equip them with specific product knowledge and soft skills to navigate complex customer interactions.    

Conclusion

Often the training materials given to extended enterprises are overlooked because they are boring and conventional. You can change the way extended enterprise training is done by changing the approach. Help everyone in your extended network learn with the same zeal as your direct employees. Make them feel emotionally connected with your products and solutions through a digital mascot or a guide. Give them a better brand experience that they can further extend to their customers. Role plays as the training approach makes this possible. 

Organizations must convince stakeholders to invest in extended enterprise training. Empowering your network to excel with product training and also helping them develop the necessary soft skills to succeed will add to your bottom line. Organizations widely deploy our off-the-shelf English language training as a part of their extended enterprise training solution. Our interactive templates for role plays make creating business simulations and branching scenarios really fast and affordable. They are customizable and can be used for any industry and audience.

There is no need to provide boring digital catalogs or customary page-turner eLearning courses when you can offer interactive role plays on mobile phones for busy executives. Talk to us to overhaul your extended enterprise training. We will take the role plays route to make your training stand out.

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EdTech: Five Areas to Focus in 2022 and Beyond

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Venture capital in the EdTech industry has grown exponentially since 2010. It was $16.1 billion in 2020, but by 2022, the industry has attracted close to $50 billion in funding! And though all the regions are growing, Asia makes up 80% of all global VC dollars. It’s a reflection of the growing demand for disruptive technology in education.

The past two years accelerated the change the industry was already going through and we have much more to look forward to in 2022 and beyond. Here are the five areas to focus on:

1. AI-enabled adaptive learning

AI is already being used extensively in learning curriculums. 2022 will only see an acceleration of this trend to create effective personalized and interactive learning experiences, which can help resolve most of the challenges the industry is facing today. Leveraging dynamic AI, education providers can enable learners to take hyper-personalized journeys by interpreting the interests of each student and predicting their behavior to offer them the exact content that they need.

For instance, Singapore-based Vere360 uses AI and VR to offer quality education for social issues and skills development. The platform partners with several knowledge partners to build content easily accessible through a VR education app. Other examples include:

>> Smart Sparrow, whose adaptive learning platform adapts through modules and offers interactive quizzes and simulations.

>> IBM Research, in association with Skillsoft, launched an adaptive learning pilot program to offer adaptive data over user-content interactions, content relationships, and consumption patterns.

2. Gamification

Gamification isn’t new; it has been in use in classrooms and corporate board rooms for years with numerous hackathons and coding challenges. In 2022, however, gamification is bound to become a mainstay with the domination of the Metaverse. Most of the learners across the corporate world and students at all levels are digital natives and already have high expectations of digital applications. This year would see elements in the EdTech companies’ strategies, where learners can create their own content and collaborate. Even educators will use resources created by game designers, giving students sufficient challenges to keep them interested.

For instance, Brainscape has customized gamification through flashcards with an extensive list of topics, where learners can create their own cards or ask the program to make the cards for them. Another famous example is Duolingo – the language learning app, where lessons are grouped in skills, and they gradually teach you vocabulary and phrases. Learners can choose daily goals, and a notable element is their “Immersion area,” which lets you practice your language skills by translating texts in a special wiki-style, collaborative system.

3. Immersive learning with VR/AR

Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR) technologies started in the gaming industry first before being adopted by the EdTech industry as an effective means of learning. The technologies help learners eliminate distractions and immerse themselves in their work. It’s also proven to be a very handy tool for students with ADD/ADHD. For instance, in 2022, teachers will increasingly use AR to teach students real-life lessons, like creating a tornado and bringing the funnel right into the classroom so students can experience these destructive storms close up.

Microsoft HoloLens has developed an interesting way to teach medical students and clinicians to interact and learn more about the human body using mixed reality. Learners can isolate, enlarge, and even walk inside the components of the human body to understand anatomy and learn how to treat different medical conditions.

4. Video-assisted learning

Videos – whether they are short or targeted clips – are huge already. And they have some proven benefits to different aspects of learners’ development and educational progress. 2022 will see more enhancements in video-assisted learning not just as a learning pedagogy but to enhance inclusivity and cultural awareness.

Teachers will use educational technologies, like whiteboards, to make their lessons varied, dynamic, and interactive. EdTech companies will increasingly use video clips or short videos to bring up a new discussion point in their courses, rather than just uploading videos on platforms for learners to watch later.

5. Learning flexibility 

2022 is also going to be the year for flexibility in learning. Technology has made our lives enriching and the same flexibility will come to learning content as well. In 2021, we spoke about the end of the 9-5 routine. Gone will be the days when there will be fixed one-or two-year academic programs. With the advent of more streamlined virtual learning tools and video conferencing, learners will be able to pursue education when, where, and at the pace that suits them best.

Higher and professional education is leveraging technology to break from the routine timelines. For instance, Birmingham Business School recently introduced its 100% online MBA program that can be completed in anything from two-and-a-half to five years. This flexibility also has a name – the hybrid-flexible model, or HyFlex, defined as simultaneously hybrid instruction (a combination of online and face-to-face), and flexible. Learners can choose to attend face-to-face or learn online.

While in 2022

2022 is an exciting year for EdTech, thanks to organizations and educators for leveraging a connected world and delivering media-rich, student-centric solutions to help learners across the globe. But as the methodologies become more accessible and interactive, technologies and expertise need to keep up with the learners’ growth aspirations. A reliable digital learning partner can help with that.

Liqvid has two decades of eLearning design and delivery experience across instructional design methodologies, content authoring tools, and learning management systems. We are the partner of choice for several reputed EdTech and extended enterprise training providers—helping them take their programs to market faster in the most efficient way. Our approach is to create personalized learning experiences for every user of the digital learning programs we deliver for our clients. We have developed hundreds of interactive templates, AI tools, and learning apps that enable our clients to hit the ground running in this fast-paced EdTech market. Contact us!

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“Role” of Role Plays in eLearning for Better Retention and Performance

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Remember those childhood days spent enacting scenarios for the doctor, nurse, even chefs? The sense of pride we all felt while asking for money from our peers as a bus conductor or catching a “thief” as a police officer.

Role plays have been an integral part of our lives and as kids, we all learned a great deal from them. It enabled us to step in the shoes of others and understand their roles. Over the years, they also became an effective way of delivering training. Today, the entire eLearning industry thrives on role plays.

What are role plays in a learning scenario?

Role-playing as a pedagogical tool has been used in various fields, from medicine to law, and from business to psychology. Though role play has traditionally been used in educational settings with an emphasis on the social dynamic of learning and fostering collaboration among students, researchers have found role plays to be useful in getting students to better grasp practical cognitive skills.

Learning can be hard. And what can be a better example to explain the concept than the famous Ebbinghaus forgetting curve. Coined by the German psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus in the late 19th century, it demonstrated the rate at which information is forgotten over time if we don’t attempt to retain it. A few studies conducted on Ebbinghaus’ theory further suggest that humans forget approximately 50% of new information within an hour of learning it, which goes up to an average of 70% within 24 hours.

Role plays as part of gamification have emerged as one of the best options to beat the forgetting curve. All that is needed is to take the mechanics of games and apply them to eLearning, which can then be used to motivate learners to complete the required learning. And, because it’s interactive and gets the learners engaged, knowledge retention is more likely.

Here are some benefits of role-playing in education and business:

  • Motivates and engages learners
  • Enhances learner retention, and in turn, performance
  • Enhances current instructional strategies and approaches
  • Provides real-world scenarios to help the learners
  • Learn real-world skills, such as negotiation, debate, collaboration, persuasion
  • Provides opportunities for critical observation of peers

When should you use role plays?

Role plays are an effective method of training for better retention and performance in learners. But should you use them every time? Not necessarily. Only a few situations warrant the use:

1. You want learners to step into someone’s shoes and view events from others perspective. For instance, making an employee think like a customer or a senior manager think like a fresher.

2. You want learners to learn and experience something which is often either not possible in a physical set up or uncomfortable to talk about. For example, letting a man experience sexual harassment as a woman.

3. You want to demonstrate the various stages of a project, from inception to launch.

4. You want to teach effective interpersonal skills.

There are several examples in real-life where companies and universities are using role plays to deliver effective eLearning. For instance,

British company HostileWorld has a flagship course called Hostile Environment Awareness Training, or HEAT, which supports a variety of sectors that deploy personnel, or work with local agents, in hostile or insecure environments. The course introduces learners to strategies for staying safe and uses role play to help learners practice behaviors, protocols, and security challenges.

The University of London recently used online role-play as part of their midwifery course to help learners get a clear understanding of the ethics through an interactive, simulated course. The role plays were designed to blend with face-to-face teaching and allowed learners to make autonomous clinical decisions as a midwife and understand what it is like in their shoes.

At Cornell University, an instructor employs virtual role-playing assignments as a learning exercise for learners, where students are broken into small groups and assigned topics to explore. There is a group discussion board labeled, “Backstage Rehearsal Area.” Over a period of four to five days, each of the performing students posts several comments per day in interaction with their fellow cast members, which is then analyzed. Many students have commented that immersion in the topic, established through role-playing, provides insight into real issues that they have faced and allows them to work through these issues in a meaningful way.

How to use role plays effectively for better retention and performance?

Meaningful role plays outside of formal training and education programs can help learners retain the subject matter better and perform better. You can enhance the effectiveness of your role plays up by several notches by considering these factors.

Capture the essence of conversations: When creating an online role play or converting a face-to-face role play exercise into an online version, you must stay focused on the desired outcome and not on the details of the conversation. Also, you need to carve out time for how conversations should branch. Writing the conversation answers and branches can be really time-consuming.

The customer or the learner isn’t always right: Feedback is an integral part of any program. But just because you got one or two negative feedbacks doesn’t mean the design itself is wrong. You must consider whether the design has reinforced your learning outcomes. In fact, purposefully designed difficult scenarios lead to better learning outcomes. Learners shouldn’t get it in the first try; they must struggle so they interact with a lot of characters and take a deep dive to understand the product or the role better.

Incorporate feedback: Including feedback in an online role play simulation can be a bit tricky but you need to add it so learners can learn effectively. So, deciding who gives the feedback and when it should be provided to the learner are crucial decisions. Ask yourself what role does feedback play in a learning process, when it should be given, and who should give it (single character or multiple characters).

Role plays in eLearning or online education

Role plays encourage learners to think more critically about complex subjects and to see situations from a different perspective. Done right, role plays can motivate students in a fun and engaging way. But for that to happen, role plays should be content-focused, match learning objectives, and be relevant to real-world situations.

A reliable and experienced eLearning partner can help you create immersive role play experiences for your learners. We have created communication skills and interview preparation skills modules using the role-playing technique in our English Language Training (ELT) solution. The learner goes through scenarios and records videos of self to play the role, practice, get feedback, and perfect skills.

We work through a compelling storytelling technique and use several motion graphics and talking head videos to make your role plays effective and boost engagement and performance. Our experience in creating digital learning content and partnership model for eLearning content development for the EdTech industry uniquely positions us to develop role play-based learning effectively. Talk to us!

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Deliver Personalized Learning Experience with Artificial Intelligence

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It’s a boom time for personalized learning, which is driven largely by on-job skill development programs featuring real-time competency analysis and online courses. From students to corporate professionals, most of them favor personalized learning. Per an Industry ARC report, the global personalized learning market is estimated to surpass $2 billion by 2024, growing at an estimated rate of around 29% from 2018 to 2024. And artificial intelligence (AI) is a great enabler to this.

What is personalized learning?

Personalized learning is a teaching approach in which the pace of learning and the learning instructions are optimized for each learner. It leverages AI and machine learning to offer interactive content to the learners with real-time performance analysis. This results in modifications to course content and timelines for efficient learning.

Personalized learning challenges traditional teaching practices by implementing a model where learning by doing takes place. The learning progresses at the rate of learners’ learning ability. As a result, it’s beneficial for corporate learning to upskill resources efficiently and for students to enhance their job readiness.

Why is personalized learning so critical today?

Think about how we now shop or watch TV online; it’s all personalized content. It’s only a matter of time before the same principles can be translated into the learning space. Today’s learning institutes face a wide range of challenges – disengaged students, high dropout rates, and the ineffectiveness of a traditional “one-size-fits-all” approach to education. This is a major topic of conversation with constantly evolving technologies and the need to upskill employees even in the enterprise learning space.

AI, when used right, can create effective personalized learning experiences which can help resolve most of these challenges. Let’s see how.

1. Boosts Engagement

AI can predict outcomes, allowing learning providers to offer content specific to a learner’s past performance and individual goals. For example, if there are skill gaps observed when a learner is taking a course, the algorithms can send targeted recommendations to help them build on their knowledge.

2. Real-time information and feedback

With AI, learners get all the information related to online resources needed to fill gaps and feedback in real-time, which equates to less seat time and training payroll hours. Learners get the information they need quickly. Even the L&D admins and support staff spend less time analyzing metrics and reports and can instead focus on producing effective learning content.

3. Automate content scheduling and delivery

AI is designed to handle routine tasks so humans can focus on other priority tasks and look at the big picture. With AI, the learning platform itself can schedule coursework for the learners or deliver resources based on individual learner assessment results or simulations. This can help the learning providers to automatically predict course maps for each of their learners and readjust as needed.

4. Boost ROI

It’s a given – AI helps the learning providers boost their ROI. And why not? After all, less time spent in training combined with personalization results in better learning outcomes. AI-equipped learning platforms can track and forecast every move of each of the learners, allowing learning providers to launch online learning resources wherever and whenever needed.

5. Innovative learning strategies

AI combines data collection and machine learning to bring automated and personalized learning strategies to life. Here’s how:

i) It identifies skills gaps and suggests the best ways to close them.

ii) It helps providers collect better and more accurate data on how learning materials are impacting individual and business performance.

iii) It proactively supports learners by deploying virtual coaches for a proactive response to personalized learning and development.

iv) It can collect and interpret a vast amount of data, enabling learning providers to easily gather key insights.

Is AI the future of personalized learning?

Research is still ongoing; however, most of the data points to AI being touted as the future of personalized learning. Personalized learning involves giving learners control to choose their learning styles and access learning resources at their pace and convenience. So, essentially, through AI, learners get to choose their preferred learning paths.

There are some challenges ahead, though. The most crucial is to help learners understand and prepare for the new technology-based world and the many disruptive technologies that will change the way work is done. Learners must understand that there always will be some tasks that must be automated, paving the way for roles requiring creative, cognitive, and emotional intelligence skills.

A reliable digital learning company can make the personalized learning experience effortless and help organizations and learners adapt to the most recent and relevant digital learning content delivery methodologies and mediums. We at Liqvid have specialized in AI for English language training (ELT). We analyzed the personalized learning paths of over 1 million learners on our platform for developing our AI tools. Our tools for vocabulary building, automated essay scoring, voice recognition for fluency development, and analytics can assign different learning paths based on learning styles. You can learn more about these AI tools by clicking HERE.

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Simulation-based Learning: 3 Reasons Why It Works

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Simulation-based learning has been around for such a long time now that it has become commonplace. Several industries are using it:

  • Aviation – Pilots in training use flight simulators to get familiar with plane controls and practice flying in different weather and landing conditions.
  • Math – Mathematicians and economists are using simulations to study probabilities and statistics in a theoretical event.
  • Manufacturing – Such plants now have simulation tools to plan, design, and train automated processes and manufacturing systems.
  • Medical – Med students are using simulations to practice surgeries, crisis interventions, and administer prescriptions.

In the eLearning industry, the pandemic only accelerated simulation-based learning. Here are some real-life examples that can help you understand.

1. Recently, the University of South Australia conducted several simulated activities in-person when the campuses reopened. Several simulated scenarios (computed tomography sim, vacbag manufacture, tattooing, personal protective equipment, etc.) enabled the university to achieve all clinical placement learning outcomes.

2. Glendale Community College in California has developed a tax simulation game for a microeconomics principles course. It teaches students to explain the link between a tax system and income distribution, identify the distributional effects of different taxes, and justify the chosen tax incidence. Students can set federal, state, and local taxes.

3. BBC developed an interesting simulation on the refugee experience mirroring the Syrian refugee crisis triggered in 2015 to help students understand the experience of the refugees and the dilemmas they faced while fleeing to Europe.

What is simulated learning anyways?

Let’s get deep into what is a simulated learning experience. You can think of simulation as a novel teaching method that tests your knowledge and skill levels by placing you in immersive problem-solving scenarios. In a simulation, usually, the instructor defines the parameters, with the end-goal being to create a safe environment for hands-on learning experiences.

Simulated training is being used in several industries to teach learners the skills needed in the real world, as we saw from the examples above. A simulation is considered effective if it answers your question, “If I do this, what happens?”

In a simulation you can test out different scenarios to see what works through a trial-and-error approach, giving you the knowledge and confidence to apply your new skills in the real world. And today, with the help of video recordings and advanced analytics, the instructor can analyze training sessions, identify errors, and discuss alternative approaches with learners.

Why simulated learning works?

Three solid reasons why it works.

1. Practical learning: How many times have you all heard this in school – “Practical is always better than theory.” And there is merit to that. Simulations can give you practical experience in the real world and prepare you well. As a med student, you can learn to perform operations and understand human anatomy better through 3-D simulations. Or, if you’re a business school student, you can learn about building better products, market, sell and service them. Bottom line, you can focus on crisis resource management and develop knowledge, skills, and attitudes in a safe and secure environment.

2. Instant feedback and a great retention aid: Learning-based simulations offer real-time and prompt feedback. You can get constructive and instant feedback, which helps you improve your skills. You can also try new, alternative skills or methods to improve old methods and test new tools. Plus, simulations make learning fun for you. Think of how much you retain from watching a fun video on machine learning algorithms rather than reading a long pdf file filled with numbers and graphs. Simulation-based learning programs equip you to better understand the actions you can take in a situation, which validates the results of training and makes it effective.

3. Collaborative skills: Perhaps, another most significant benefit of simulation-based learning is developing your collaborative skills in a fun way. In a simulated environment, you are introduced to several real-life scenarios, which would need you to collaborate with other members of your team. You also get insights into your own behavior.

The future of simulation-based learning

With Virtual Reality simulators becoming more accessible, less expensive, and increasingly realistic, simulation-based learning are the go-to mode for bridging the gap between structured training and real-life experiences.

Today learners are digital technology natives, so their expectation is that training will challenge them, immerse them into a personalized learning journey. Simulation-based learning helps meet that learner expectations by offering VR experiences, 3D-avatar based learning environments or AI-based role-play simulations.

This helps to accelerate the learning curve of learners in a simulated environment, reproducing real-life conditions without time or space limitations and much fewer risks than real environments. It’s also supported by a recent study, supported by the Korea World Bank Partnerships Facility. The study shows that VR training is, on average, more effective than traditional training, developing students’ technical, practical, and socio-emotional skills. And the results are particularly promising in the fields of health and safety, engineering, and technical education.

How can Liqvid help?

Training simulations should not be created in isolation. Businesses need a robust learning management system for delivery and analytics to loop in feedback and continuous improvement of the learner. We have been creating simulations for educational institutions for a few years, and the demand has been increasing since the pandemic hit us.

One of our recent projects was about developing a multi-player, virtual pharmacy simulation game for a polytechnic in Singapore to make their students proficient in routine tasks performed in a pharmacy – receiving, typing, packaging, and dispensing. And the result – improved engagement, better learning, and retention!

Several top vocational training and education institutes are widely using simulations for skill development. Contact us if you need a partner to help make your simulation-based learning needs a reality.

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Talking Head Videos for eLearning: 4 Reasons Why They Work

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Videos are great storytellers. They can get your audience to connect and communicate with you on a deeper emotional level, even more than words or pictures. They also help build trust as people can “see” you, what you stand for, and really “connect.”

This is where talking head videos are making waves, especially in eLearning. People are spending more time online. And though there are different kinds of video formats, talking head videos have gained a strong foothold— especially post-COVID, when the need for in-person interactions is sky-high.

And it’s also the most straightforward solution to use in your training.

What is a Talking Head Video?

A talking head video is, literally, a video with a person explaining or talking about a topic directly to the camera. In this video format, only the person’s upper body and head are visible.

The instructor is usually off-center in such videos, and the background is primarily blank or plain. Sometimes, the instructor’s image is showcased in a picture-in-picture (PIP) frame in the corner, and the rest of the screen is filled with a screencast, software simulation, or visuals to highlight or support the presenter’s points.

Here are some examples of talking videos in eLearning:

>> “The Future of Storytelling” MOOC by the University of Applied Sciences Potsdam (FH Potsdam) – A plus point of this video is that it’s not just a recording of a lecture that has been uploaded online. The instructor is natural in front of the camera and genuinely likable.

>> Algebra Basics by Rob in Math Antics – Another great example of a talking head video introducing the concepts of unknown values and variables in algebra.

>> Chief Learning Officer video – It’s a slightly different style of a talking head video, where the presenter talks about creating the infrastructure to support lifelong learning. This video creates a more immersive effect with the view transitioning from the camera laptop to the external camera and vice versa.

Done well, talking head videos can help your learners get to know the instructors and institution and provide a personalized experience.

4 Reasons Why Talking Head Videos Work

1. Cheap and easy to create – The sheer number of talking head videos on platforms like YouTube or Vimeo shows the popularity of this format. And it’s primarily because of the minimal operational costs. All you need is a camera, the video script, an editing tool, and you’re good to go! Anyone with knowledge about the subject matter can create them, and it’s also turning out to be a great resource for cultivating a knowledge-sharing culture.

2. Accommodate different learning styles – Not all learners are the same when it comes to retention and comprehension. And the larger your audience, the more diverse are their respective learning styles. Some people respond to words, while others learn better with visuals or audio. With talking head videos, you can ensure that every learner is receiving information in a format that’s easy to digest.

3. The human element – Perhaps, the most important reason for the popularity of such videos. Research suggests that we are more motivated when there’s a human figurehead providing guidance. Such videos offer a semblance and warmth of in-person interactions in the remote and contactless world through several nonverbal cues, including facial expressions, hand gestures, and intonation. Also, instructors often speak directly into the camera in a talking head video to create a personal, one-on-one learning experience.

4. Aligns well with microlearning – Microlearning (bite-sized learning, where the topic is broken into easy-to-learn small chunks) has become a dominant form of course delivery in eLearning. One of the microlearning course types resembles the talking-head video format, consisting of an interview with an expert where they are asked burning questions. The entire interview is recorded and then divided into several shorter clips or micro-videos.

Use More Talking Head Videos to Supercharge Your eLearning

Talking head videos are common, classic, and proving to be extremely effective in eLearning. Because they are so simple to create, practically anyone can make them with minimal overhead. However, there are several experienced eLearning content development companies like Liqvid who can guide you.

We can build your courses with a thorough understanding of your organization’s training goals and vision for the learning curriculum. We have designed several interactive video learning for various global education providers. Recently, we designed talking head-style video courses to transition the green rating certifications for GRIHA-certified projects online due to COVID-19. We integrated such videos into the existing modules with enhanced graphics, resulting in an uninterrupted certification program with a solid online learning experience.

Contact us today to see how we can create interactive talking head videos that work for you.

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The Value of Simulation-based Learning in EdTech

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  • A health simulation company offers computer simulations to help educate college students about substance use and sexual misconduct prevention.
  • The School of Nursing has introduced UNLV’s Poverty Simulation, an interprofessional education exercise to help students from Nursing, Medicine, and Dental Medicine understand the challenges of poverty and the resources and barriers connected with community services.
  • Students at the Michigan Tech Research Institute built an app simulation to enable scientists and engineers to measure hydraulic conductivity while simultaneously recording their data with ease and efficiency.

Examples like these show the growing importance of simulation-based learning in the EdTech world. 2020 was all about settling and getting used to the remote learning model. As online education and remote or hybrid workplace training continue to be the reality for most, simulation-based learning will find more acceptance.

Simulation-based learning offers learners a wide range of opportunities to deep dive into complex topics and practice skills. Let’s see how simulation has evolved over the years.

History of Simulation

Simulation training has been around for a very long time. Perhaps, the earliest application can be traced back to WWII when mathematicians John Von Neumann and Stanislaw Ulam used newly developed computing techniques to model nuclear detonation for weapon design. Post this, the aviation industry completed aviation training in 1910 with the release of the first flight simulator.

Other industries soon followed. In the field of anesthesia in the late 1960s, full-body mannequin simulators were introduced based on work done by Denson and Abrahamson from the University of Southern California. From the 1970s, we began to see several computer-generated simulators.

Today, we’ve 3-D landscapes with the precise scale of landscapes in the real world. Simulation training has now expanded to a range of industries like healthcare, military, law enforcement, transportation, and more. But as we saw from the examples mentioned at the start, the recent strides of simulations in EdTech look most promising.

Let’s see how simulations are revolutionizing the EdTech space with several benefits for the learners.

8 Benefits of Simulations-based Learning

1. Practical learning: How many times have we heard the stuff – “Practical is always better than theory”? And there is merit to that. When your learners are aiming to be leaders in the business, simulations are one thing that can give them practical experience in the real world and prepare well. For instance, medical students can learn to perform operations and know human anatomy better through 3D simulations. Similarly, business school students would learn about running a business better with a simulation that can teach them to develop new products, market them, sell, and service them.

2. Instant feedback: The biggest advantage of simulations is real-time and prompt feedback. Trainers can provide constructive feedback, which offers learners opportunities to improve their skills. They can also try new, alternative skills or methods to improve old methods.

3. Collaborative skills: Perhaps, the single biggest benefit of simulation-based learning is seamless collaboration. Simulations introduce learners to several real-life scenarios, which require some cooperation between the participants. When simulated training solutions are implemented, learners often work with each other, which helps improve their teamwork abilities.

4. Retention aspect: Simulations make learning fun, which aids a lot when it comes to retention. Simulation-based learning programs equip learners to understand the actions they can take in a situation, which will, in turn, help them retain the concepts better. It also sort of validates the results of training and makes it effective.

5. Risk management: Simulation-based learning helps in risk management. Learners can be trained on the required concepts, and a business can test the efficacy and performance of the solution or product to learn what is working and what isn’t. this helps in risk management to a great extent.

6. Cost-effective: A simulation-based learning environment is always cost-effective compared to the real world. There are no travel or other admin costs involved in such an environment or in a remote setting to train the learners. Even the time and expenses are reduced significantly with improved retention and hands-on methods.

7. Multiple users: Of course, simulation-based learning supports multiple learners at one go; there’s no cap on the number of participants in the training, unlike a physical set-up.

8. Optimum resource utilization: Simulations can help in the management of resource utilization. Lesser resources are required to run a simulation compared to physical training sessions.

Simulations in EdTech – the Future is Bright

In today’s connected world, simulations can bridge the gap between structured training and real-life experiences. But creating simulations that stay true to the learning goals and are effective as well require expertise.

An experienced eLearning content development partner like Liqvid can help you design effective simulations with our end-to-end offerings. We have our own software development kit (SDK) consisting of several simulations templates that allow us to do rapid prototyping and development.

Our learning simulations are the preferred choice for global organizations with robust content authoring, LMS integration, and analytics. Contact us today to see how we can create interactive simulations for you.

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