Often when we talk about our work, we talk in terms of ‘what’ we did. The Showing My Work series of posts aim to also capture the ‘how’ something was done.

E-Learning Heroes Challenge #57 – Preventing Workplace Violence. The brief: This week your challenge is to show scenario examples designed to prevent or address workplace violence. You can structure your demo any way you like – just be sure to include some type of scenario.

For this challenge, I decided to use a branching scenario. This type of scenario gets learners involved in a situation and takes them down a path based on the choices they make (as opposed to just being right or wrong).

One of the first things I did was to re-read a couple of great posts about branching scenarios:

Build Branched E-Learning Scenarios in Three Simple Steps by Tom Kuhlmann

When Do You Need a Branching Scenario? By Cathy Moore

Because this was a demo and I had limited time, I decided to create a simple branching scenario around the theme of workplace bullying. In the scenario, you are an observer to a situation and you need to make a choice as to what you should do if you saw these events happening.

Out of the four possible choices, there is one correct action and three different results for the other three actions. Rather than using feedback layers, you move to a new screen based on your selection. You’ll see the consequences of your decision and have the opportunity to select another action.

None of the consequences say directly if they are ‘right’ or ‘wrong’, instead there is a reaction by one or both of the characters in the scenario and another decision may have to be made. For an incorrect choice, the follow-up question is ‘Now what will you do?’ I used radio buttons for each response and depending on the selection made; it takes you to one of the four slides. The different actions are repeated on each slide (except the action that was selected).

For the background I used an office style picture (to give context) and made it semi-transparent so it didn’t dominate the screen. I place the image on a Master slide to keep everything consistent.

While branching scenarios take longer to develop and build, the experience for the learner is much improved and, in the real world, if we make an incorrect choice we can often make another decision to get things back on track.

Here’s my demo, you can click on the image to view it:

Let me know what you think and you can see all of my ELH Challenge entries on My Portfolio page.