Tin Can helps Transition Associates to make elearning engaging
Transition Associates, a UK developer of elearning and mobile learning, is investing in the new Tin Can e-learning standard to make the next generation of learning on mobile devices more engaging, and is using the ‘millionaire’ game format to show course authors its advantages.
Transition Associates believes that Tin Can offers advantages to elearning developers by extending what was possible using Scorm: to make elearning better than before.
“We are investing in Tin Can in a novel way, through the use of games”, explained Transition’s David Bowden, an evangelist for better elearning. “We want to show course authors that by using Tin Can they can take existing courses and, in many cases, elearning tools that they already have access to, and make elearning more engaging”.
Transition has completed an initial proof-of-concept by taking a standard Lectora game - Who wants to be a millionaire? - and a standard web server, and has used Tin Can to make the game competitive: specifically using Tin Can to store players’ names, their scores and render a scoreboard.
“People are familiar with the millionaire game format and it’s easy to relate the work we’ve done on it to different learning contexts, such as in assessment, compliance, curation, gaming, surveys, teaming and workflow”.
“By introducing the competitive aspect, we’ve shown how simple it can be to enhance a passive factual challenge into a friendly competition with an inbuilt motivation to complete the task, compare scores with others and to get a high score. One of the biggest challenges with creating elearning is to make it interesting, relevant and memorable, and a key for achieving that is engagement”, poses Bowden, who argues that the next generation of elearning courses, especially courses on mobile devices, will be more engaging than the last.
“This is not rocket science, but Transition has shown how Tin Can goes way beyond Scorm and can enhance the potency of existing learning, with little or no significant new investment”, he added.
Transition’s proof of concept Millionaire Tin Can Game is available for elearning and L&D professionals to try for themselves.
Those who would like to know more about incorporating Tin Can into their elearning can contact Miles Corbett at Transition at [email protected] or on +44 (0)1959 543900.