CASE STUDY

Custom tech powers scenarios for immersive learning

In an emergency, Environment Agency incident managers must mobilise the personnel and resources to protect homes, businesses and lives. With our bespoke tools and content, the highly specialist training these roles demand has been made more productive, cost-effective and flexible.

Challenge

The Environment Agency (EA) trains hundreds of incident managers from across the country each year. They needed to make the most of the time and money invested in bringing field staff together for instructor-led training and simulations. But they also needed a solution that could credibly convey the complexity of emergent incidents – covering threats from chemical attacks, flood, radiation, air-borne pollution and more.

Key points

Custom elearning content
Bespoke learning tools
Instructional design
Multimedia design

Solution

Our instructional designers worked alongside EA experts to map the theory and practical skills needed by incident managers, and create a learning structure to:

explain the basic concepts and procedures succinctly
demonstrate their importance to decision making and outcomes
apply and assess learning using interactive scenarios.

We created a series of scenarios, based on different types of incidents, where learners adopted different roles and responded to unfolding events accordingly.

No existing learning tool allowed the level of immersion, detail and complexity that EA’s simulations demanded. So our software developers built a custom scenario engine that could do everything the Environment Agency needed.

The final scenarios allowed learners to:

receive information from video, diagrams, emails and photos
be scored across multiple criteria simultaneously
view real time results via a meter-like display
refer back to policy and procedures from preceding tutorials
revise decisions to learn from mistakes
review a log of decisions and performance ratings from across the exercise.

A collage of images from the EA incident management training

Result

The scenario-based elearning became a prerequisite for all staff attending instructor-led training and simulations.

Now that everyone participating in live training has a base understanding and proficiency, EA’s face-to-face delivery has been able to achieve better results, more quickly – saving time and money.

Enabling staff to complete the foundation stages on demand from anywhere, rather than waiting for a complete cohort, also provides more business flexibility.

Another benefit has been the ability to offer the elearning to a wider pool of staff – increasing understanding and appreciation of strategic incident management across the agency.

This elearning quickly became a flagship resource within EA and Can Studios was asked to present and showcase the tool at a multi-agency incident response forum.