Recently one of our clients asked us to build an technical support simulation. In this simulation, the engineers would be responding to the customer via a series of emails. Their developers were used to using Articulate’s Storyline for building on-line training. In this case, they decided to build both versions – ACES™ and Storyline.

For those of you not familiar with our simulation platform ACES™, has the ability to recognize key-words, conduct complex and multiple randomized branching, and uses speech recognition for verbal responses.

The primary differences in both designs were as follows:

1. ACES™ set up randomized branching as to not “game” the system, the Storyline version did not have randomized paths
2. The Storyline vs. presented multiple-choice options as which response to the customer was best vs. ACES™ allowed the user to actually compose the email. We did provide a hint but if a hint was used, their points were deducted.
3. There were three initial branches for both options, due to the fact we also included randomization, we were able to build in Six scoring options vs. the one scoring option supplied by Storyline.
4. When the results were presented, the user could review their composed emails with the instructor if they questioned their results. This was not an option in the Storyline version.
5. Based upon which path the user chose at the beginning and which keywords they selected, we provided a breakdown of their score into for clearly defined behaviors they have defined as departmental skills they choose to reinforce. The users were able to see how well they scored for each of these behaviors. Storyline was not able to do this.

Don’t get me wrong there are benefits to both tools but in my 30 years of building and delivering enterprise training solutions, one thing I know for sure is, the more active vs. passive the training is, the better results you will get. This is why I am a proponent of non-SCORM based tools as we have grown beyond this capability to track and measure more behaviors and skills vs. simply measuring completions.

If you have read this far, share with me what tools you feel should be highlighted that may fall into the non-SCORM camp as well.