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A reality check for transitioning teachers

Hello,

This blog post is meant to be a powerful reality check that may be unpleasant to read, but that can greatly improve your job perspectives over the long term.

Teaching does not prepare you for instructional design. Teaching prepares you to become a trainer for an organization, assuming that you first get the job you want to train people in and become better than most of the people doing it. Once you become a corporate trainer, this usually comes with light responsibilities in instructional design or management. You learn where the cracks are in the performance of the employees you train, and how to fix it.

At some point, if you make the effort to develop your skills, you become good enough to be able to do this full time as an instructional designer.

This is the path I took to instructional design, and I suggest you do the same. Especially, avoid working for agencies like the plague. Begin in-house, and you may eventually go for consulting jobs, if you are able to carefully select your consulting firm, after you have been an ID inside the organization.

Instructional Design is not a junior position. Of all the ID projects I have handled in my career, none of them would have been accessible to me directly from my teaching job, not even a little. To be honest, I think most of you have been thoroughly exposed to this fact through your applications. I’ve seen many of you panic and complain when seeing a list of skills and requirements like this one:

• Business need analysis
• Setting learning objectives
• Learning theories and instructional design models
• E-Learning design tools (Adobe Captivate, Articulate 365, Lectora, or other)
• Microsoft Office 365
• Copywriting
• Visual Design skills (Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign or other)
• Animation and video (Vyond, Adobe After Effects, Camtasia or other)
• Learning Management System management
• Attendance reporting
• Return on Investment Evaluation
• Asset: Project management skills
• Asset: Customer service skills
• Asset: Experience in our industry

Dividing instructional design

The truth is, the job of instructional designer can be split into 2 parts:

• Instructional design
• Multimedia production

Having a great multimedia artist to produce your designs is an immense boon to somebody who doesn’t have those skills, and there is little overlap between the two jobs. As long as the instructional designer communicates well and has a good idea of the capacities of their multimedia artist, the two jobs can be separated safely.

For major projects, you can even have the multimedia production spread out across different specialties, if the project is major enough to warrant it (A Storyline document with text and images with basic animations doesn’t really warrant it in my opinion, but a 3D virtual reality simulation of a surgery that includes both VR glasses and a physical mannequin will take a whole multimedia team to produce).

The instructional design part, however, CANNOT be spread out among multiple people without significantly damaging the project, creating a lower quality product in a far longer time frame, unless it’s a massive project like the multidisciplinary surgery training mentioned above, with multiple people of different specialties all trained in one session. The reason for this is simple.

The job of an instructional designer is not to create the pedagogy of the training. This is a complete misconception of what an ID does.

An instructional designer’s job is to find out how to improve employee’s job performance and make it happen. You will never, ever get a good understanding of what employees need to improve, in a field you don’t know, by reading the report of some business analyst. You need to dig in way deeper than that, directly with the learners and their immediate supervisors, to learn what needs improving in a very detailed way. Broad strokes given to you by somebody else will never do the trick.

For example, in customer service, you have to know that, in your company, if a customer says that the product is too expensive, many employees tend to refute the customer’s objection (by saying something like “the prices are actually lower than our competitors!”), while they should be asking the customer what they want exactly, in order to establish whether the customer really needs only what is offered in the cheaper option, or if there is something that the customer wants that does make the higher-priced product worth the additional expense.

This is situational knowledge, and you will not get a strong enough idea of what needs improving if somebody else does the needs analysis for you. Context and the realities of the job matters. As an instructional designer, beyond just presenting theory, you will have to design simulations that mirrors the person’s work context as closely as possible to create the practice activities, showcasing the issues caused by making the bad decisions as well as the advantages of doing things the right way, so that the cognitive effort to take the theory and actually apply it in their work is not hopelessly daunting. This means you have to have both feet on the field with the people doing the work to learn from it.

Isn’t that unfair to teachers?

The truth is: it sucks, but it’s not unfair. It’s a different job with a different set of skills. For comparison, let us check the skills and requirements a chemistry teacher needs to have in order to do their job, based on my own experience:

• Pedagogy in the classroom
• Creating interactive pedagogical activities
• Writing clearly on the blackboard (old) or smart board (new)
• PowerPoint, and possibly other software
• Classroom management
• Knowledge of the subject matter and how to teach that specifically
• Designing homework
• Designing exams
• Designing experiments
• Grading homework
• Grading exams
• Grading experiments
• Adapting to students with disabilities
• Offering emotional support to students in difficult situations

How do you react when you hear someone say they could be a great teacher just because they can explain stuff clearly, but they are missing everything else?

The truth is, some of those items are so important that missing just one of them will send the whole classroom into a downward, toxic spiral. Bad classroom management? You lose control and nothing else can happen. You can’t explain stuff? Your students won’t understand anything. Your exams are way too difficult because you are unable to gauge them properly? You will fail a bunch of students who deserved to pass, hindering their career path. Note how little overlap there is between this job description and the ID one. Teaching is not instructional design. Teaching is training. An unprepared instructional designer cannot take over a teacher’s job any more than an unprepared teacher can take over an instructional designer job.

Does it really mean that I should start at the bottom?

Nyes.

You have a lot of experience that will make learning instructional design a lot faster than somebody else who starts at the bottom. You are like a professional athlete running a 400 meters dash on a racetrack while the others who start at the bottom with you are average people running through a swamp. You may begin at the same line, but you are equipped to outrun them significantly.

And that is where the value of your educational experience lies. In reaching higher positions faster. You know a lot about cognitive theory, pedagogy, psychology, and learning. You might also be older and more mature than many colleagues who are just starting out.

Now, if you are a teacher in a well-paid permanent position, starting over a new career from the bottom might not be financially viable. Most people cannot afford to drop their salary from 85 000 $ per year to 35 000 $, because of prior financial obligations. However, if you are in one of those school districts in the USA that pay teachers 13 $ per hour, or if you are a substitute teacher with very unequal paydays, that first corporate job might be better for you financially than remaining in teaching. If that is the case, strongly consider that option.

Personally, I started in a call center. 18 months later, I was a corporate trainer. I got a bunch of interim positions (management and instructional design), realized that my company was going to always give me the tasks but never the job and salary that came with it, started job hopping, and now I’m doing very well for myself. My salary almost tripled in 11 years. I am a senior L&D consultant now. Climbing the ladder from the bottom was the right plan, even though it was sometimes painful.

Photo by Abbie Bernet on Unsplash

Effective E-Learning 1- Scenario Design

Scenario Design

In “Effective E-Learning” series of articles, I will give you my thoughts on the most important steps you can take to make e-learning (or any type of learning activity, really) into an effective force that drives results and positively impacts your organization’s performance.

This first article will focus on the key to my success as an instructional designer: scenarios and simulations. I will give you a methodology that should help you design them, whether you want to simulate a patient-doctor interactions, interpretations of commercial law or car maintenance. I will illustrate how to use this methodology to teach customer service interactions at each step.

Step 1- Find the specific behaviours that need to change

Regardless of the subject matter, if training is required, it means that some people are performing some tasks less than optimally. Before you determine which scenario you want to run, you need to ask the subject matter experts the following three questions, at the same time:

• What are employees doing wrong?
• What are employees doing that they should not be doing?
• What are employees not doing while they should be doing it?

Make sure that you get answers that are specific enough for your needs, and not excessively general comments. To help you determine how useful a statement is, you can refer to the following examples:

• “They don’t know how to talk to customers.” is too generalized to be any help to you.
• “They don’t know how to handle customer complaints.” is more interesting.
• “When they receive a complaint about the job done, they tend to go on the defensive immediately, without even checking the validity of the claim, which irritates the customers even more” is a great example of an issue you can help with using training.

Even in the last example, it is worth it to be even more specific. Ask the subject matter expert for a concrete example of this happening, what was said, in what tone, etc.

Step 2- Determine the appropriate actions the learner should take in those situations

This step is usually easy. Simply ask the subject matter experts what the learners should do in the situation described in step 1. There might be multiple good answers to that question: write down all of them.

Step 3- Create the prototype simulation

Now that you know what the targeted learners do wrong and what they should do instead, you are ready to build your first prototype of the activity. I recommend against storyboarding at this stage, as building a rapid prototype that will show the client and the subject matter expert an example of the activity (without advanced graphic design and interactivity built in at this stage) will be easier and faster than trying to explain said activity with words using a storyboard.

Sometimes, the learners struggle only with one specific action, and the simulation will end up being either a multiple choice, a HotSpot, or a drag-and drop question, and those question types are already programmed into any respectable e-learning authoring tool, such as Articulate Storyline or Adobe Captivate. Creating a fast prototype for such an activity should be very easy.

In other situations, however, events cascade one into the next, and you need to create branching scenarios. These are more complex scenarios

Articulate Rise has a limited support for branching scenarios, but if the situation is the least bit complex, you will run out of options, or go beyond the number of character this tool supports. You can also create branching scenarios in PowerPoint by programming actions or in Articulate Storyline using triggers, but you need to be somewhat savvy with those programs to pull it off (I might make a demo some day).

The best tool to create branching scenarios, however, is Twine: https://twinery.org/. This is free software that allows you to create branching scenarios similar to the “Choose your own adventure” books of the 1980’s and 1990’s. In this software, you present a situation inside a webpage created by the software, and in this webpage, and you give a choice to the learner between multiple options.

When learners click on one of the options, they are led to a webpage that continues the story or the simulation by following up on that choice. Another learner, who makes a different choice, will be led to a different follow-up, and that learner’s story will continue in this branching path.

What this allows you to do, even without adding any bells and whistles (no image, no graphic design, etc.), is to show the subject matter expert how the scenario or the simulation would unfold according to the choices made by the learner. You have complete control over what happens. Maybe a learner who makes a choice that is too much on the wrong side must start the exercise again, a learner who made acceptable choices is offered the choice to restart the activity or not, and the learner who made all the best possible choices is strongly encouraged to complete the activity. You can create a number of branching paths that converge back into a single new situation. If you are an advanced user, you can even remember learner choices to create a conclusion that is adapted to that specific learner’s actions.

At the end of the story, at the last step of every branching scenario, create a feedback for the activity that is adapted to what the learner did and the choices they made.

The complete set of tutorials for Twine can be found here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iKFZhIHD7Xk&list=PLklITFhXtPCCKadv-0Gcbqoj3OCev695D&index1

Step 4- Showcase the prototype to the SME and client

Once you created the first prototype, without having spent a large amount of time on it (unless it is your first time using Twine and you needed to learn the tool), you should show the prototype to the subject matter experts and get their opinions. Make sure that they understand that this is just a prototype, and not at all the finished product. Did you understand the problem well? Is the feedback appropriate? Is this activity efficient in showing the learners how to apply what they learned in their job?

What needs correcting?

Make the appropriate corrections, and then show the prototype to the client. Once again, make sure that they understand that this is just a prototype to showcase what you want to do. See if they are on board with your ideas. Make the necessary corrections afterwards.

Step 5- Create the final version of the first activity

If there are multimedia production artists or technicians working with you, this step belongs entirely to them. The purpose here is to create the final version of the learning activity you created when building the prototype. At this stage, you want the final product to look professional, to be easy to use (as much as is reasonable considering what you are simulating), and to be fully functional, with no bugs whatsoever affecting the experience.

Step 6- Validate the finished product

This step usually succeeds with little challenge from the SME and the client, because their concerns have likely been addressed in step 4.

However, this step is the last validation of this type of learning activity you are designing for the whole project, and this is their last opportunity to object to parts of it without unduly slowing down the project. This also serves as a selling point, since you will be showing a finished product, something that is a lot more impressive than any prototype you’Ve built thus far.

Step 7- Use the finalized learning activity as a template

Once you have created and perfected a learning activity that has a high quality, it is often useful to use it as a template for similar learning activities, instead of building everything from scratch every time.

For example, if you built a simulation of a customer service interaction to handle objections about price, you can use the same basic design choices for other customer interactions, such as handling objections based on the product or validating the customer’s satisfaction at the end of the interaction. The text and the list of choices will differ from one activity to the next, obviously, but the graphic design, the general strategy, the code that handles interactivity and feedback personalization, etc., are all decided upon.

Also, when designing new simulations, the SME will know exactly what you are working towards, so their job is now significantly easier than it was before, increasing your team’s efficiency.

Photo by Compare Fibre on Unsplash

From teacher to instructional designer

An opinion on what can help you

I have heard of many teachers who want to transition to into instructional design. Teaching during the pandemic has become more difficult, and this has exacerbated an attrition problem that preceded our current situation.

The following advice applies only to teachers who want to make that transition, as I did many years ago. If you come from a different background, much of the advice here might be counterproductive to your needs.

I have heard about a lot of “coaches” who will sell you instructional design classes, usually to master ID software such as Articulate Storyline and Articulate Rise, often for thousands of dollars.

Here is the problem I have with most of those courses: they are teaching you the wrong skills. Those courses can be great for people who come from the industry and know nothing of training of teaching, but those software solutions are easy to learn. Articulate Storyline used to be a PowerPoint add-on, and if you are proficient at PowerPoint (which most teachers should be, I surmise), learning Articulate Storyline using free online tutorials should take you less than a full day of work. Articulate Rise is even easier to learn.

Those courses can help you build a portfolio that looks good, but that’s about it. And, honestly, I believe that you can do that on your own if you are willing to spend a little bit of money on a visual website builder.

Having made the transition from teaching to instructional design a long time ago, I can tell you that the skills I needed to learn to make it in my current profession were the following:

• Practical training
• Organizational Development
• Industry

Practical training

Unless you work for some kind of vocational school, as a teacher, your current job is largely to give your students a depth and breadth of knowledge and skills that will help them learn whatever specific job they will end up in, and possibly to make them better, more informed citizens.

This should remain an important part of your profession once you become an instructional designer. However, as an instructional designer, most of the training that will be requested of you will be to improve employee performance on a specific task.

I strongly suggest you learn how to do that. You have all the prerequisite skills to do so, but it is a change in perspective that can be a little daunting if you do not prepare for it. To learn this skill, I suggest you take one or both of the following paths:

• Get classes that train students more directly to perform a specific job.
• Study Cathy Moore’s Scenario Design and Action Mapping.

While I will state that Cathy Moore’s stance on never giving theoretical explanations before scenarios is excessive, the techniques she teaches are very useful to someone making the transition you are seeking.

You might also want to join Tim Slade’s eLearning Academy & Community to help you build your portfolio and skills.

Organizational Development

Broadly speaking, organizational development is the management skill meant to help you assess the needs of your organization, find the solutions that will improve performance, and evaluate the results. Coming into the ID field from a teaching background, this is likely to be your main weakness. Schools, generally speaking, are managed differently than other organizations. Seeing your principal or rector in action will give you little insight on how companies work.

Personally, I fixed this problem by joining the telecommunications industry at the bottom of the ladder, taking management courses, and attending communities of practice on organizational development, and holding interim ID or management positions for years before finally getting my first permanent “Training specialist” position.

You might not have the patience, or the financial situation necessary to go through that as I did.

A lot of instructional designers will argue that their job is only to fulfill whatever training requests are put on their desk, assuming that everything else has been handled perfectly, and that the request fits exactly the organization’s needs. If you want your job to matter, that is the wrong approach.

My advice is this: before you get your first ID job, read “Map It”, Cathy Moore’s book on Action Mapping. You can buy it here.

You may also review the basics of action mapping here.

Learn nothing else on organizational development before you start. You would squander any further training that you take, simply because it would be too much to take in at this moment.

Once you get your first job as an instructional designer, you will have the opportunity to apply action mapping in your work. At multiple points, you will find areas where you struggle to deal with how your employer operates. Either you don’t understand the power dynamics at play, or you will feel as if some things seem to run inefficiently for no reason anyone can remember.

At this point, apply my second advice for learning organizational development: connect with people. Talk with everybody. If a director asks you to create training to improve how they complete a specific task, talk to the director, the subject experts, the learners, the managers of the learners, the people affected by the issues caused by the mistakes that the director wants to stop, and also talk to your own manager. In every company I have worked at, there were people who had figured out what the organization’s problems were and had some ideas on how to fix them (those ideas on how to fix things were not always good, however). Being aware of what everybody thinks about an issue will greatly help you in designing efficient training.

As you start to grow into your new role (maybe within a few months of being hired), start looking for new learning opportunities. Personally, I love communities of practice, but university management courses might be more to your liking. Either way, as you learn organizational design and management while working within a company, you will be able to link your theoretical learning to actual workplace situations, making the learning opportunities that much more worthwhile. This will take you from junior to senior roles a lot more quickly than just another set of Articulate courses ever will.

If you speak French and want to learn organizational design (which the author calls by another name), I strongly suggest the communities of practice by Aliter Concept’s François Lavallée. If you speak English only, I don’t know which communities of practice on organizational development are good, sorry about that.

Learn an industry

Finally, as an instructional designer, you will create courses or training modules on something. Try to improve your knowledge of that subject matter, and on the industry that depends on it. If you teach at a university or a vocational school, you probably have some industry knowledge already, be it about law firms, chemistry, or welding.

If you teach general education high school, getting into any industry might prove a touch more difficult, however. This is the main reason why I chose to join an industry at the bottom and climb the ladder, personally.

If you do not have an industry that you believe would be specifically favorable to your set of skills, I suggest applying to any employer that you don’t specifically object to. Once you start working in an industry, if you connect with people and create training for them as I suggested earlier, you will eventually get a good grasp of that field.

The great thing about that is that, as you start mastering the jargon, the technical skills, and also the culture of an industry, you will more easily understand your subject matter experts, greatly reducing the time spent with them just to get a grasp on things. Also, you will gather an arsenal of learning activities that you will be able to use to teach some aspect of this business. For example, if you are in the pool maintenance business, you might develop a few styles of short training videos that teach specific maintenance operations, meaning that you only have to plug in the contents of a specific maintenance task into one of those to create your training. These techniques would be pretty much useless for other industries, such as call centers, but are key training solutions where you work.

By this, I don’t mean that you should necessarily stick to one industry. There are multiple reasons to change fields, market conditions being chief among them. But getting solid experience in a few industries can really help your potential as a hire, and your efficiency as an instructional designer.

Portfolio launch!

Alexandre Foisy-Geoffroy’s portfolio

This is the portfolio I have been meaning to create for a while now.

This is but a small sample of the (usually confidential) projects that I have had the pleasure of working on in my years as in instructional designer.

In my line of work, I have handled the following tasks associated with learning & development:

• Training
• Coaching
• Instructional Design
• Multimedia integration/coding
• Needs assessment
• Organizational Development
• Change management
• Choice, configuration and administration of a learning management system
• ROI evaluation through KPI calculations that I personally automated

I have also been an active member of multiple communities of practice since 2013. Those communities of practice have mostly focused on organizational development, although they have also covered training and management in a significant manner.

Having had the chance to experience almost all aspects of learning design, except for graphic design and 3D modelling, I am looking forward to move upwards into a role focusing on strategy or management. This is where I shine.

At Belron Canada, when I helped the company’s largest province, Ontario, recover from a deficit to a strong profitability in the two years I worked for them, it was not purely because of my pedagogical skills. It was mostly through my skills in organizational development. I developed a network encompassing mid and high level management in Operations, IT, HR, Marketing, and inside the call centres. Not only did I create the training for the Ontarian customer service representatives, but I also helped retool the call centre training to bring it in line with the rest of the company. I made sure that marketing was aware of our whole sales process, so that all marketing strategies would align with our work. I made use of the new tablets that all service centres were receiving, and designed all the training for this exact screen size. I made the marketing department aware of our new LMS’ capabilities for training outside clients without giving them access to our internal documents.

Building those relationships within the company is what I do best.

And with those relationships, I can truly improve the performance of your teams, across multiple channels, with a measurable effect on your bottom line.

This is what you get when you hire me.

Photo by Zalfa Imani on Unsplash

Training during the pandemic

How can we adapt our training to the ongoing pandemic?

Many industries have been affected deeply by pandemic, and the Learning & Development trade has been affected more than many others.

After 2 years of confinement, most trainers have realized that putting in-person training materials online does not work properly, but solutions are few and far between. Many teams do not have the capability to design quality asynchronous e-learning, and they might simply not have the number of learners that would justify such an expense.

I suggest three techniques of going forward to resolve those issues, depending on your specific needs:

• Create instructions that can be followed on the job site
• Use breakout rooms during webinars
• Allow the use of search engines and video sharing websites

Create instructions that can be followed on the job site

For simple tasks, or tasks which can be broken down into small steps, you can make the training material available for use at the moment the learner needs it.

In the case of software training, especially if the software is created in-house, the ideal solution is to include instructions within the software itself. For example, a user could go to the Help menu, chose a task to perform, and the software itself will use tooltips to show the learner where to click in order to complete that task. You have probably seen this technique used by some websites when they add new features, and they tell you about them through the website itself. “Walkme” is an example of a software solution designed to do exactly that.

For manual labour, short instructional videos can be created, then made available on a tablet or computer near the work site of the employees who might need them.

For example, if your team designs a new method to clean a filter used in your manufacturing process, making the demonstration available any time a worker feels the need to watch it before performing said maintenance will reduce mistakes, and is likely to be much more useful than having the employee watch the same video at an unrelated time.

Use breakout rooms during webinars

As a trainer, when you transfer from the classroom to a webinar, you lose a lot of interactivity between you and the students. Also, it is much harder to realize when you’re starting to lose your students, even if their cameras are turned on. The connection between you and them is never the same as what it was.

This means that, if you attempt to use lectures to teach a subject, you will lose your students a lot faster in a webinar than you would in a classroom. The adaptation that will solve this problem is to use breakout rooms, a functionality already programmed into Zoom, Microsoft Teams and a lot of other videoconferencing software.

The way I handle breakout rooms is by giving the learners a question to ponder. Generally speaking, I ask them how they would apply what they have learned in their work. and give them a set amount of time to talk about this issue with a few of their peers (4 or 5 people).

To see an example where I use a breakout room, you can look at the PowerPoint presentation in my portfolio by clicking here.

Allow the use of search engines and video sharing websites

There is a secret that allows technical support to do their job, and support a large variety of applications that they never get to use themselves as a part of their daily jobs. Whenever you give them an error code, they don’t know what it means by heart. They Google it.

This solution does not work for homemade tools and processes, but for commercial software and machines, there is often a plethora of tutorials online, including many in video format, which will show how to perform specific tasks. The best tutorials, or at least the most popular ones, typically reach the top of the search results.

This means that, very often, the best training you could design is already available online, and creating it all from the ground up is likely to be a waste of resources. This is especially true of very popular software, such as Microsoft Office. It might be useful to curate lessons, or create some new lesson for a specific usage, however.

If you allow people to use the free resources to learn when they need to, it allows you to focus on creating the training that really needs to be designed from scratch, either to make it better, or to cover more pertinent subjects.

The soul of a story

How do we write stories that move our audience?

Training modules are full of stories, from anecdotes to conversation simulations, and the training as a whole is often a story onto itself. Through it, the learners make sense of the notions being taught, and they become emotionally invested in the results you are trying to help them achieve.

While stories can easily be structured using the three acts method of Greek plays, or the hero’s journey from Disney movies, writing a good story is another topic altogether.

So, the question is: where can you find inspiration for your stories? How can you make them coalesce into something interesting?

Find something that matters

One important part of any story is that it needs to matter, emotionally speaking, to the person watching it.

The rule of thumb is this: if the story matters to you, or to the expert, it will matter to the learners too. Pick personal stories that have affected one of you emotionally and start with that. The emotions can be positive or negative.

For example, if you are working in healthcare, you might want to use a situation where a parent almost lost a child, or when the expert told a patient that she was in full remission from cancer. Don’t go into the improbable or overly dramatic, however. Ideally, the notions taught in this training would directly relate to the event in question. And help either avert the negative situation or make the positive situation possible.

Use convergence

The convergence of ideas is the key to original stories. No single idea is truly original by itself. No single idea can create a whole story.

It is the combination of ideas that make for a great and unique story. Let us take an example from my own literary writing projects. We start with 4 ideas:

1. The characters line in a space station
2. The society is a cultural hegemony: no cultural differences
3. A planet under the space station inhabited by an alien lifeform that is close to reaching space travel
4. Séances where the living and ghosts can spend an evening together, crossing into each other’s world

None of those ideas, by themselves, make an original story.

1. This was done in Babylon V
2. This was done in 1984, or Le Meilleur des mondes
3. This is a recurring theme in Star Trek, the subject of their Prime Directive
4.  This was done in Coco (the Disney movie)

However, if you weave them together, you get a story no one ever wrote:

The characters live in a space station where humans, a homogeneous cultural group who ignores its past cultural genocides which led humanity to hegemony, survey a planet and watch in fear as they realize that the alien lifeform below has the potential to reach for the stars, and perhaps, eventually, threaten humanity. This tempts many humans to consider genocidal action against the alien lifeform to prevent this possibility.

Within that society, some secret societies have harnessed the ability to contact the world of the ghosts. One of the two main characters die at the beginning of the story, and the other one is thrust into this occult underworld trying to contact her beloved.

Those storylines mingle as the hero comes to understand that there is a limited amount of soul stuff, or ectoplasm, in the universe, and the demographic growth of humanity is forever stunted by this limitation, lest humanity come to bear once again the birth of soulless humans, and the cataclysm that unfolded when that event first happened towards the end of the 21st century of the old calendar.

The alien lifeform below, however, seems able to produce its own ectoplasm, ever giving itself more soul to work with. A secret well guarded. The true purpose of those humans who wish to protect the alien lifeform is not a moral one. Rather, it is to enslave those beings, terraform worlds to make them fit prisons for them, and forever harness the soul stuff they generate to bring humanity forward.

The characters will navigate those conflicts and try to work their way towards a third conclusion, where humanity will establish contact with the alien lifeform and broker peace and collaboration instead.

The same goes for any story you write. If you pick a few common occurrences in your line of work, all of them related to what you want to teach, and bring them together into a coherent story, you will get a story that is meaningful, and that has depth in characters and storyline both.

Note that, as opposed to the example above, which is meant for literary fiction, your examples should be believable. They should also be applicable to the learners’ line of work.

If you wish to learn more about writing stories, I strongly suggest Neil Gaiman’s Masterclass. Simply listening to Neil Gaiman speak is a pleasure by itself.

Photo by Nong V on Unsplash