Post by Melissa Milloway

I borrowed a design technique from Disney and Universal theme parks to build a 911 dispatch training course. Theme park designers figured out how to keep people immersed in a story and making decisions inside a structured experience without stepping outside it to explain what's happening. The techniques they use are called ride tropes. For instance at Disney, the stretching room in Haunted Mansion tells you there's no way out and shows you what happened to the last person who couldn't find one before the ride begins, so you arrive at the loading area already feeling like what happens next has consequences for you. Ride tropes in some cases may help with simulation-based training and here's two reasons why. ➡️ Most training pulls learners out of the experience to explain what they're learning and why. Ride tropes keep them inside it. When a supervisor character briefs an operator before a practice call instead of an a screen or instructor listing objectives, the learner stays positioned as someone doing the job rather than someone studying it and that positioning may change how they engage with the practice. ➡️ 911 operators are learning to make decisions under pressure with incomplete information from a caller who can't always tell them what's wrong. If the practice environment matches those conditions, the operator is rehearsing the actual skill. If the practice environment doesn't match those conditions, the operator hasn't practiced using the skill under a similar pressure they'll face on a live call, which may make it less likely the skill transfers to the job. The first trope I used is the caller story. Before a ride begins, there's a pre-show that pulls you into the world. You're not told what's about to happen. You're shown what's at risk, who needs help, and why you're the one who has to act. You arrive at the ride already inside the story. In Triage Under Pressure, before the learner takes their first practice call, they hear from a fictional caller built from 911 call patterns. Her husband was behaving strangely. She couldn't describe what was wrong. She waited four minutes before calling because she wasn't sure it was an emergency. The dispatcher asked the right questions and sent the right resource. He survived. Two things happen when the learner hears that story first. They understand the consequences of sending the wrong resource because they've seen what sending the right one made possible. And they understand this simulation is a place to make mistakes and learn from them, because the dispatcher in that story had to learn it too. There are five more ride tropes in this course. I'll break them down as we go. And if you're just finding this, I'm building a mock 911 dispatch training program and documenting every decision in public. The course is called Triage Under Pressure. I'm documenting the whole process here. #eLearning #InstructionalDesign #LearningandDevelopment