The best moments usually occur if a person’s body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile. — Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi
The last time I felt fully immersed in an activity, I was playing Stardew Valley. While building my farm and wooing the local doctor, I felt totally absorbed in the narrative and had no real sense of time passing. It felt like I lost myself in the game.
This concept of total absorption in a task is referred to as a state of flow, a form of immersion that "melt[s] together . . . action and consciousness."
Immersive experiences that cultivate a state of flow enhance learning, with the potential to increase knowledge retention up to 75%. Immersion improves learning outcomes through a number of mechanisms:
Simulating real experiences that encode as lived memories
Enhancing emotional salience
Leveraging intrinsic motivation
Maximizing enjoyment and pleasure
Creating a safe, realistic learning environment
Providing opportunities for practice
This article will outline three principles for designing immersive learning experiences in your next eLearning project.
Friction
Emotioneering describes the concept of creating emotional immersion in gaming experiences. Experiences that change a person's emotional state are experienced as more immersive and transformative. They also enhance learning through activation of the amygdala, a key emotional processing center in the brain.
Designing an emotional, transformative experience requires some degree of tension or friction:
The presence of friction is one of the key differences between a service and an experience. A service is designed to remove friction . . . In an experience, however, friction is an essential ingredient: when we overcome a challenge, we grow and can ultimately be transformed. — Olivia Squire, World XO
The idea that immersion requires some amount of suffering or challenge is mirrored in the work of Harvard cardiologist Herbert Benson, who outlines four stages to a flow state:
A challenging learning experience balances the demands of the activity with the skill level of the learner. Designing for the right level of challenge is difficult to do well: the goal is to provide just the right level of stress so the learner has an opportunity to grow, develop new skills, and foster a sense of accomplishment and competence.
Incorporating narrative features (plot, setting, and characters) creates a backdrop for the challenges the learner experiences and context for the goals they are striving to achieve. The SPENT simulation is an excellent example of a text-based, narrative-focused game that introduces unpredictability through a variety of challenges over the course of the game.
Control
The term ludicity refers to the idea of designing for recreation and play. Ludic design supports exploration, discovery, playfulness, and ambiguity, and it de-emphasizes external goals.
Ludic design results in an immersive experience when the learner perceives a sense of control over their actions. The learner is able to control their character, explore and intervene in their environment, and realize the consequences of their decisions. The learner receives immediate and unambiguous feedback so they understand the rules of their environment and how their activity influences their outcomes.
When providing feedback in eLearning activities, it should be rooted in realistic consequences of the learner's actions. Spelling out for the learner that their choice was "correct" or "incorrect" breaks their state of flow and, it turns out, is less effective than learning through trial and error. Cathy Moore, a thought leader in the eLearning community, developed a great example of how to help learners learn from their mistakes in her Learning Zeko scenario example.
Perspective
There's been growing interest in extended reality (XR) experiences such as virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) in the eLearning space. Research shows that one of the reasons XR is an effective learning modality is that when you experience yourself within an experience—especially if you can visualize a part of your own body—that experience is encoded as if it were a real, lived memory.
While XR is not feasible or necessary for every learning intervention, some aesthetic principles of XR design can be leveraged to generate more immersive eLearning experiences:
Create a first-person point of view. Treat the screen as a window, not as a box, when designing the look-and-feel of the experience.
Ensure the aesthetics are visually appealing but appropriate and realistic to the scenario.
Use any style (abstract, stylized, or photorealistic) but be consistent. The visuals do not need to be strictly realistic as we don't experience reality as it is; rather, our brains sample sensory input from the environment and make predictions based on our expectations.
Eliminate any distracting elements.
One of my favorite examples of this is an interactive recruiting experience created by Deloitte that uses a first-person camera perspective of a prospective new hire spending a day in the office.
Interested in learning more about flow or XR design in eLearning? Check out these additional resources:
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