Principles of Smart Video Role Play: Enhancing Communication Skills in a User-friendly Format
We have developed Smart Video Role Play (SVRP) based on the experiences of thousands of participants and dozens of organizations worldwide. By using this format, you can be sure that the training program fits modern reality perfectly.
- High expectations. Employees and students expect digital learning tools to resemble the apps they use in daily life: it should be brief, appealing (visually), realistic and directly applicable.
- Short attention span. Participants often lack time, are easily distracted and maybe they have other priorities: it's crucial to catch their attention and to retain it.
- Improving communication is hard. Improving communication skills is based on doing. This means it can be challenging. Therefore, a safe and motivating environment is necessary.
By conforming to the participants' needs, you will reach the goal more quickly: the goal of improving the professional communication of employees and students.
The principles of Smart Video Role Play
- It’s about doing. Training with TrainTool is always focused on learning new skills that can be used in practice immediately. We believe that the precious time of participants can be used best by practicing a lot. Everything else is just there for support.
- User-friendly and simple. The structure of Role Plays (and therefore, a program) is very simple. There are only a few types of activities that are repeated constantly: theory, videos, multiple choice questions, the exercise and self-appraisal. In this way, a participant will always know what to expect and they can concentrate on the content instead of figuring out a new type of activity.
- Small steps over time. Role Plays have been constructed in such a way that you will always learn something new (theory), practice (exercise) and confirm a skill (self-appraisal) within minutes. This motivates and builds on confidence. The learning effect is increased when the exercises are spread over time.
- Only the essence. At TrainTool, we can talk about communication techniques for hours. Chances are that you, as a trainer or content developer, will have such an interest as well. Most participants, however, do not share this interest. They will probably want to learn techniques that are of use to them as quickly and easily as possible. The structure of Role Plays forces you to transfer only the essence (by, for example, restricting the length of texts). Each word counts!
What doesn't fit
We can imagine that you will miss some things, when you are used to other e-learning tools. The following choices have been made deliberately.
- Only knowledge. Smart Video Role Play is clearly focused on training communication skills. It's not possible to use SVRP for informative or knowledge-oriented training programs. Because of this focus, TrainTool is still developing in the field of online communication training programs and we remain the best tool in the field.
- Unlimited texts or number of questions. You can make as many Role Plays as you want. However, within these Role Plays, the flexibility is restricted: for example, it's not possible to add long texts or an unlimited number of questions. In this way, the participant will always know what to expect and the focus on simplicity and practice is secured. By dividing the theory over separate Role Plays, you can still use all the necessary theory.
- Open questions. We don't use open questions in SVRP anymore, instead, we use multiple choice questions. The reason is: a) quicker and simpler for the participant on every device, b) direct feedback motivates (which is more difficult with an open question), c) to restrict the number of types of activities.