Chapter 19 STORY-BASED LEARNING ENVIRONMENTS

There is no substitute for experience in the acquisition of complex skills. The goal of virtual environment training is not to reduce the need for experience, but rather to provide experiences to trainees with less cost, risk, and time than would be required if these experiences were instead acquired on-the-job. Accord-ingly, the challenge in developing effective virtual environment training is designing experiences for trainees that support learning. In story-based learning environments these experiences are designed to have distinctly narrative qual-ities: a set of characters, a temporal sequence of causally related events, a rich but relevant amount of descriptive detail, and a point. Typically the trainee par-ticipates as a character within this environment following a learning-by-doing pedagogical strategy, and the actions taken affect the outcomes of an emerging storyline. In the ideal case, the trainees in a story-based learning environment walk away with a story to tell about their training experience—one that is not markedly different from the best stories that practitioners tell about their real world experiences. The research history of story-based learning environments over the last three decades has been driven by changes in technology, but defined by particular para-digms of instructional design. In the late 1980s the Learning Technology Center at Vanderbilt University was a center of research in story-based learning environ-ments, guided by the design principles of anchored instruction (Cognition and Technology Group at Vanderbilt, 1990). The university’s Jasper Woodbury project used a hypertext-controlled video laser-disc player to present students with problems grounded in a fictional scenario, where completing the problems would enable the students to write their own ending to the story (Cognition an