Early November, in 2006, the eLearning team from ICICI Bank requested TATA Interactive Systems to recommend a training intervention program that would help make their people, involved in the Inward Clearing process, more efficient. One of their tasks involved spotting up to 18 potential discrepancies on each bearer cheque in less than 7 seconds to overcome the high volumes of transactions everyday. For the bank, an incorrect decision of passing or holding a cheque has severe regulatory, financial and legal implications. The need, as we saw it, was to entice their employees to demonstrate exceptional skills in the task. Our solution, ‘Cheque-Mate’, was a skill-enhancer game designed around our Game Based Learning (GamBLs™) model. It put the player in an imaginary world where he/she was challenged to tag a series of correct and incorrect cheques according to an identified discrepancy in a limited time. The player would customize the game to match his/her ability using time and complexity controls at the start of the game. The player was scored on speed and accuracy of their decisions and recognition for good performance corresponded to the degree of challenge. The game used a dynamic data model that generated different data sets for every session to ensure replay-ability, another key attribute of GamBLs™. The game was received with great enthusiasm by both the eLearning group and the employees of ICICI Bank. It also won the APEX Award this year. In focus group testing, one of the players said,  "When I started, I could hardly find errors in a cheque, but after practice, I could track errors quite easily. So definitely playing over again I would look forward to improving my scores and reducing the errors." Another said, "It made me sit back and concentrate to ensure good scores."Since November, 2006, TATA Interactive Systems have created four highly engaging GamBLs™ for ICICI Bank and are in the process of developing four more around the roles of cashiers, back-end operations, Branch managers, customer sales representatives and sales representatives. Mr. K. Ramkumar, Group Head - HR, ICICI Bank expressed his excitement about the role of gaming in his department vision for the future in an article that appeared in The Mint recently. (Chandra Shekhar Ghildiyal is Deputy Head - Game-Based Learning at TATA Interactive Systems)

The TLDF 2007 received an overwhelming response with over 200 attendees making it to The Grand Hyatt, Mumbai that played host to the day-long event. The TLDF 2007 brought together national and international speakers, deans, principals, teachers, and even families of students with learning disabilities. This year, the TLDF 2007 not only discussed working together for the benefit of LD students, but also welcomed on stage, the students and parents of students who have overcome learning difficulties. While the TLDF 2006 successfully spread awareness on LD, the TLDF 2007 went a step ahead and brought together speakers and participants from across the globe to gather support for LD students in India. For the last two years the TLDF has proudly provided a platform for this cause, and with the support and encouragement of positive results, we will continue to encourage, enable, and empower LD students for a better future!    Some of the topics discussed in the sessions were: the steps beyond LD certification, multidisciplinary approaches, medical aspects, the role of a Special Educator, how to identify LD in the classroom, the social and emotional aspects of LD and most importantly, the role of the Government. To enable a greater sharing of knowledge and extend our support to this cause, we have made the TLDF presentations available on http://tldf.tatainteractive.com.

I am eating my words. I am selling myself down the river. I am completely contradicting what I wrote in my blog post circa 2006, titled "Give me Back My Fun Learning!" in which I thundered against rapidly developed, plain vanilla e-learning and lamented for fun-filled, engaging e-learning. Call it fickle mindedness or call it evolution, but ladies and gentlemen, I have seen light. I have realized that e-learning in the corporate sense is not about the "greater artistic question" but about the "greater business question". In a sense, the distinction is similar to mainstream blockbusters and art-house cinema. True, e-learning as it is "ought to be" needs to be fun/funny, out-of-the-box, and challenging; it needs to surprise; and it needs to push the envelope of the medium. But e-learning that works with the masses ought to be plain functional. This wisdom comes from working with a leading multinational manufacturing company in the past year. The e-learning we were engaged to develop for them was part of a company-wide strategic realignment journey. E-learning was to be an enabler and a change agent that would help its close to 100,000 employees across the globe change the way they have been working and adopt a new way. Because of the business imperative, e-learning development was time-bound and mission-critical. So naturally, we chose the blockbuster route. If the word "formula" has already suggested itself to you, give yourself a cigar! Our formula was governed by some "Thou Shalt" rules, as one of our SME puts it. It included the following: Thou shalt keep it simple: You will not make the learners jump through the hoops of frustrating interactions, bewildering exploratory activities, and tricky questions. Make the learning to-the-point and get to it quickly. Thou shalt keep it short: Remember that the learners have tons of other stuff to learn/unlearn, in addition to their daily job-related activities. Don’t stretch them. Thou shalt keep it consistent: Far too much is changing in the learners’ lives even without playing a game every time they open an e-learning program. Use a template that is easy to understand and rely on. Thou shalt keep it literal: Metaphors, puns, flourishes of style, and "clever" or "cute" animations/images only irritate the learners. They are also difficult to translate. Thou shalt keep it in context: Let the learners know why they are doing it before launching them into games, case studies, or "try it" activities. If you are telling them a fictitious story, let them know upfront. Thou shalt not be a perfectionist: While guarding against blatant errors and inaccuracies, don’t treat e-learning as a magnum opus. In the real world, continuous improvement makes far more sense. E-learning development and implementation is an iterative cycle in which every new version is better than the one before. Get it out so that this cycle can start. Has it worked? Well, early results seem to indicate that it has. Close to 10,000 learners have taken around 40 hours of learning and they’ve scored us (on an average) 5 on a scale of 0 - 6. Moreover, all e-learning modules are out on time for senior management to implement downstream strategic activities. And what about me? Much as I dream to be the "independent" e-learning maker, I am currently enjoying my role as the wily studio executive! (Priya is Deputy Practice Head - Instructional Design, Products & Skills Training Practice at TIS.)

Gifts in the festive season are normal and welcome, but awards are even better. And when we landed two awards this month, we couldn’t stop smiling. So allow us to preen a bit. First up was the ASTD Atlanta T-BL SIG (in simple English, that is Technology-based Learning Special Interest Group) E-Learning Award in the Custom Content category for the story-based learning (StoBL) solution we developed on the subject of Fire Safety for the NewYork Presbyterian Hospitals. We hope this laurel will give more muscle and credence to our conviction that stories are strong vehicles for instruction, especially for subjects like safety, compliance, ethics, and leadership. The second award is even more special to us. Focusing on the learning disabled has been a serious CSR (Corporate Social Responsibility) initiative for us for the last few years. One of the landmark events for us in this direction has been the TLDF (Tata Learning Disabilities Forum). We held it for the first time in 2006, with a fair degree of success (read our post on that event here). The 2007 one, we thought, turned out to be even better (post here). Which thought was confirmed when we won the Reader’s Digest Pegasus CSR Gold Award in the category "Contribution to Society - Imparting Education". Positive portents as we step into the New Year. Wishes for the season.

After eight years of scripting lessons that start with objectives and end with a summary, it is a welcome change to script stories for TATA Sky, India’s premier direct-to-home television service. There are no modules or lessons, no tools or tips, no knowledge checks or learning aids, no graphic organizers or assessments; just seven screens of fun, color, and magic! Scripting for TATA Sky Actve Stories is a writer’s dream. It is about writing stories for children in the age group of 3 years to 10 years. Some of the stories are original; some are adaptations from folklore, grandmother tales, mythology, and history; and some others are anecdotes from the lives of great national and international personalities. All stories are moral based or deal with a problem that children of the target age group commonly face like, getting lost, sharing, being clean, being lazy, etc. Each story is of the same small size—just seven screens! The first screen is the title screen and the remaining six house the story with full screen graphics and 2-3 lines of text each. For me, the greatest satisfaction of being part of this project is being able to see the stories on television and seeing user reactions first hand. Almost every day (since I do not have a TATA Sky connection as yet), I head to the nearest Croma (an electronics retail chain in India, also owned by the TATA Group) to check out the story being aired that day. And while the salesman rattles out the benefits of taking a connection for the umpteenth time, I skip through the seven screens, drool over the awesome graphics, and try to ignore my son shouting, "Mummy you wrote that?" On some days when we have friends and family visiting, the enquiries for TATA Sky connections in Croma are a little more. But the real satisfaction is when I stand behind and watch the little children in the store leave their parents and rush to stare at the screen. TATA Sky Actve Stories do not have the fast paced animations or the action packed sequences children of today are used to. But it yet succeeds (as initial feedback suggests) in its own charming way, in doing what it is meant to do—introduce children to a magical world of characters who live and learn from experience just like they do, and teach them some morals without actually doing so. (Susan John is Senior Specialist - Instructional Design at TATA Interactive Systems)

On January 20, 2008, TATA Interactive Systems (TIS) celebrated team spirit by participating in the fifth annual Mumbai Marathon. TIS has been running the marathon for three consecutive years in support of students with learning disabilities—extending its initiatives beyond schools and the teaching community. This year the participating TISians were sporting T-shirts promoting the message of the TLDF 2007—Together Let’s Define the Future, and even carried a banner spreading awareness of the cause. Click here for more pics.

Regulatory and compliance training has always been a thorn in the flesh of training managers. There are the regulatory authorities to satisfy as they want records of training completion; there are the reporting managers to reckon with because they don’t want their wards to be off their workplace for too long; there are the learners to manage, because they don’t particularly find the content interesting. Then there is the business end of it - how do you ensure that compliance training leads to compliance, and how does that lead to an improvement in organizational performance? Answers have been sought, with limited success. Little wonder then that compliance training has been long on rhetoric and short on transformational approaches. Here are five key challenges in developing e-learning courses in compliance training.Compliance training is a grudge purchase. Implementing compliance training is as exciting as replacing car tires - you get no particular joy doing it, but not doing so is not an option. The same applies to the people getting trained and their reporting managers. The challenge is deceptively simple: How do we drive learners into adopting compliance as matter of habit? How do we integrate it with the way they work and think? Compliance training is more than just training. Compliance training is as much about communication and sensitization as it is about training, perhaps more of the former. It’s about making the learner aware of changes in regulations; it’s about getting the learner to understand the not-so-pleasant consequences of not adhering to certain norms and practices of behavior; it’s about ensuring the learner remembers certain key principles when s/he is in the middle of a professional transaction. Consequently, approaches to compliance training need to vary depending on the different requirements and application scenarios.Much of what compliance training covers is not new to the learner. This is because a large part of compliance training is perhaps intuitive (not unlike the statutory warning on cigarette packs) and/or known to a large part of the learner audience, especially the more experienced ones. Consequently, the content of a compliance training course comes across as a blinding flash of the obvious to many a learner, and hence gets ignored. The challenge is to consider layered approaches to the instructional design of compliance training courses, so experienced users and novices alike get the most out of the course.Ignorance is not bliss. Not knowing the law is not an excuse for breaking it. Hence, the speed with which new compliance guidelines are communicated to the learner audience is an integral requirement of compliance training. This includes a design that accommodates changes seamlessly, and development tools that enable quick changes to be made by subject matter experts or program managers or training managers.Prioritization is possible. Quite often, compliance courses tend to be long and cognitively heavy because there is an imperative to expose all the content to the learner. Sure legislation mandates that, but if the content can be prioritized and exposed to the learner in smaller chunks and on an as-needed basis, effectiveness can perhaps be enhanced.(Geetha Krishnan is Head - Consulting with Tata Interactive Systems.)

(Priya Thiyagarajan, Deputy Head - Instructional Design with TATA Interactive Systems takes a pot at the Learning Circuits Blog’s Big Question for March 2008.) My peer group is an organic encyclopedia. I sometimes fancy that among us, we’ll have the answers to most of the questions in the world—from the meaning of "hemi demisemiquaver" to the benefits of proportional representation in a democracy to the nuances of RFID implementation. That’s because we are the Facebook-ing, Youtube-ing, Wiki-ing, blog-ing knowledge-age kids on the block. We are in the driver seats of those earthmovers that are busy flattening the world. Information is our faith and fodder. Our intellectual biceps may be well developed, but it is debatable whether that makes us faster or more competent workers. Most of our knowledge is context-less, so many bits of data, pushed to us by a ubiquitous and aggressive web of new-age technology. This is just the tip of the crisis iceberg. IDC reports that the amount of information created, captured, and replicated in the digital universe in 2007 was 281 exabytes (or 281 billion gigabytes), outstripping the knowledge created by all the books ever written by a few million times, its gargantuan appetite swallowing all the existing storage options. And it is only going to get worse. In 2011, there will be nearly 1,800 exabytes of information created. Whither this information? What is the sane way of cataloguing, prioritizing, and processing this? How can this stupendous amount of data be distilled into something that can be useful and beneficial to us? More importantly, are we left to fend for ourselves in this binary jungle? IT service providers are definitely part of the rescue team, with their powerful, context-sensitive, and intuitive decision support tools that makes sense of this data. But what about enterprise support functions such as Learning & Development and Knowledge Management? Where do they stand?Which brings me to the Big Question of the month from the Learning Circuits Blog: "What is the Scope of our Responsibility as Learning Professionals (for supporting Long Tail learning)?" The primary responsibility, I believe, is to populate the Long Tail with "chicken soup" content. "Chicken soup" courses are wholesome, healthy, without frills, and easy to digest. In a sea of bewildering information, they are the safe haven, dependable guys, curtain raisers, and anchors. The key features of such courses are as follows: They are short. They are simple. They give a succinct overview of the facts/concepts/processes/principles. They have a sound instructional design foundation. The quality of content is high. They form the conduit for "deep dive" learning, if the learners so desire. They are easy and relatively economical to develop and maintain. As I see it, the edifice of learning content in an enterprise needs to be modeled as follows: Why should learning professionals be responsible for this, you might ask. What about Subject Matter Experts? What about the learners themselves? The answer is simple: learning professionals have the necessary ID competencies to analyze, deconstruct, mould, and re-construct raw content into learning gold. They may not know how recidivists are dealt by Collections, but they sure know what standard to peg the course at, how much content is the right amount, where the interactivities could go, and what the learner should be tested on. In addition to developing and owning the "chicken soup" content, I see learning professionals responsible for moderating, maintaining, and measuring the learning content of an enterprise. Moderation I am not suggesting a police nation here. I see the learning professionals moderating the learning system for quality and relevance of content. I also see them facilitating participation in social learning. Maintenance As continuous improvement becomes a culture, learning professionals, in collaboration with SMEs, need to update learning content to make it current and useful. Measurement Learning professionals should be responsible for measuring the effectiveness of learning out there, using parameters that are developed in collaboration with HR. This measurement will feed into the continuous improvement cycle. To conclude, I view the role of a learning professional as that of a guide, who helps learners navigate through the tricky maze of information overload.

(Preeti Jasnani, Deputy Head - Instructional Design with TATA Interactive Systems reflects on the Learning Circuits Blog’s Big Question for April.) I could start making a genuine attempt to adopt a simple and what experts call a ‘no-nonsense’ approach to learning, and thereby design. As an e-learning professional, most of my work caters to adult learners. And we adults don’t like to waste time; at least we’d like to believe so! Each time I get down to designing a new course, I focus on ensuring sound instructional design that would work for the said target audience and the said subject matter. I think in terms of scenarios, stories, simulations, and games and make every attempt to come up with a new, ‘out-of-the box’ strategy to create a learning environment that is fairly interactive and engaging for my learner. Holy intentions indeed! Then, why does each course I build almost always leave behind the lingering question: Do the learners really need all the information and interactivity that has been plugged in or is the learner being held hostage by the course? I must confess I’m afraid to hear the answer. That brings me back to the big question: What could I do better as a learning professional? I sure could start building courses that don’t waste my learner’s time. And how can I do this?  It’s all about focus, I reckon. About understanding the real purpose of the course and defining definite objectives, thus avoiding information overload. About adopting a ‘no-nonsense’ approach with which I can decide which course needs to be interactive and engaging and which other could be a simple ‘click and read.’ About realizing that each course need not really be a course!

Happy Planet, a clay animation - or ‘claymation’ - film developed by TATA Interactive Systems (TIS) has won its second award. This time it has been chosen for the Best Animated Frames (BAF) 2008 Award organized by the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry (FICCI). The BAF Awards, which are part of Frames, Asia's largest convention on the entertainment industry, comprise three categories: Animation, Gaming and Video Effects. Happy Planet, sent in the Animation category, was adjudged the Best Animated Social Welfare film. It had recently won the DigiCon6+3 Territorial Award in India and Japan.