Have you ever been told your eLearning courses were engaging, fun, approachable, or fresh? It finally happened to me and I owe it to the 4-Door design model.
Currently, my primary employer (for about a decade) has been a financial services software company. For them, I almost exclusively create eLearning content using various media to train our clients how to use our software – large, enterprise-systems that run their financial institutions. This is important because it identifies the type of training we do – external clients, software training, for profit, etc.
In the past, similar to most eLearning development teams, we developed very linear courses. These courses may have included some basic branching situations, there may have been basic simulations, but it was all essentially glorified “Next” buttons and a skill check at the end. They start at the beginning and work their way to the end, module by module.
We were ready for a shift because we could sense the change in the industry starting to occur. We had been looking at the concept of “flipping the classroom” as a way to rethink what we were doing. I intend to spend a good deal of time discussing that model in several other posts – this is not that discussion though.
One day, I was looking through some blog posts that I receive through various blog feed tools and I saw one about a new Instructional Design model called the “4-Door” model.