Online learning can take many forms, from simply reading a page to interactively participating in virtual classrooms or simulations. Also widely variable is how training is produced, the production time, price, and in the end, its effectiveness. Are you choosing the right method for teaching? Sometimes you can tell information to your learners, but other times you may see better results if you show.

Mind & Media recently launched a training community website for therapists helping couples deal with the challenges of Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). Learners attend a classroom session and then are granted access to the online community where they can expand on the one-time classroom experience. Sure the site will include manuals, and a discussion forum, where information is told, but also in the works is the development of role-play videos that will show great examples of how to conduct the therapy. They’re very real and relevant scenarios, too, created by the experts. No scripts, no actors, and no big bucks. Here’s why role-plays by experts beat scripted, acted scenes just about any day of the week when it comes to effective, affordable training.

For this training project we videotaped eight role-play scenarios in one day, ranging from 8- to 25-minutes. Pre-production was virtually non-existent—no locations to scout, no scripts to write, and no actors to find, screen, hire, and prepare to play doctor or patient. Mind & Media has a beautiful brainstorming room that served as our therapy office so that was kind of a lucky break, but the decisions about script and actors were as much about efficacy as about budget.

The trainers, who served as the actors, loosely developed the scenarios during their travel to our office. That was all the prep time they needed because they knew the content, techniques, and even typical patient behaviors like the back of their hands. The familiarity with the subject made the acting all the more realistic. While we were shooting one trainer told us of at time they had used professional actors for a similar project and they ended up with bad overacting by folks more interested in their careers than the task at hand. Not to say all actors would derail the project, but if your luck does happen to go bad on shoot day, how would you recover?

The production itself went fast, too. Quality assurance for each scenario happened on the fly since all “actors” were subject matters experts. They could prep a scene in a few minutes and complete it in one take. We rolled two cameras to capture the whole scene in real-time whenever possible. We did use a production assistant to keep track of details during any multi-take scenes to make sure we kept continuity, since there was no script or storyboard, but in general the group of trainers and production staff at Mind & Media, just worked smartly and kept things rolling. The scenes were so real that at times I felt uncomfortable watching the fictional husband and wife spar in front of their therapist!

While the trainers may conduct some role-plays during the classroom training, having video role-plays online may be even more effective. They’re not limited to just that one classroom, and if need be the learner just clicks rewind and watches it again, any time of day, any place with an Internet connection. And the bonus, since the videos will be rolled into the larger community learning site, is that viewers can watch the scenarios and then discuss them with peers and the trainers in the forum to keep the learning environment current and ever-growing.