Video Games and the Transfer of Knowledge and Skills
One of my favorite past times has been playing video games. When my family emigrated to the United States when I was four, I couldn’t speak a lick of English. I liked watching the television, but I hardly understood what they said. Video games were easy for me to understand because you didn’t need to know how to read or understand English to play them. A button did one thing. Now as an adult, I still play them, and I find the way they create tutorials interesting. There is a lot to learn as an instructional design professional about the subtle ways that video games teach players skills, and how they are able to transfer that knowledge into gameplay.
One of the most difficult things I have found when designing learning solutions is the struggle to create instruction that leads to transferable knowledge and skills. Learners can test well, and recite the knowledge back to you, but freeze up when they have to apply it to their work environment.
Video games have several advantages over eLearning and instructor-led courses. For one, the learning environment is the performance environment. We often try to mimic these two realities when designing a learning environment, but that’s not always possible. An eLearning course on diversity is a much different space than face-to-face interactions with people from differing backgrounds. The other main advantage is that video games are leisure activities. Video game designers are probably less inclined to create their games with something like the ARCS model (Attention-Relevance-Confidence-Satisfaction) because the player is already intrinsically motivated to play. If they weren’t, they would probably be doing something else in their leisure time.
So what can we learn as instructional designers? I think for one, we need to find more ways to have the learning environment mimic the performance environment. We could think about how the audience could learn this information if they were on-the-job.
We could also focus on the assessments as a tool to create transfer. Instead of simple response, and multiple choice assessments, we could create scenario-based solutions that make the learners reflect on the information and how they would use it in the real world. A worked example is also an invaluable replacement for traditional assessments or even practice activities. Learners get to see the step-by-step use of their knowledge, and how it would be applicable.
As for motivation, I tend to lean on using the ARCS Model and Adult Learning Theory to ensure that my learners understand why this information is useful to them. We cannot rectify some of these things simply by making things more gamified or like video games. There is potential there, but from my experience, it is important to let the theory and the analysis guide instructional development.
