Grounding Serious Game Design on Scientific Findings: The Case of ENACT on Soft Skills Training and Assessment
The lack of open-access tool for the enhancement and promotion of soft skills is bringing the e-learning community to new educational challenges. The paper describes the implementation of ENACT, an online serious game for the standardised psychometric ass
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Plymouth University, Plymouth, UK {davide.marocco,daniela.pacella,e.dellaquila}@plymouth.ac.uk 2 AIDVANCED Srl, Rome, Italy [email protected]
Abstract. The lack of open-access tool for the enhancement and promotion of soft skills is bringing the e-learning community to new educational challenges. The paper describes the implementation of ENACT, an online serious game for the standardised psychometric assessment and training of users’ negotiation skills through the interaction with virtual artificial agents. The assessment process is divided into 8 scenarios based on real life situations and investigates the user negotiation styles in relation to Rahim’s conceptualization of five different styles of handling conflict. Need analysis data and preliminary testing results of the platform are presented. Keywords: e-Learning · Technology-enhanced eearning · Serious games · Simulation-based learning · Psychometric assessment · Negotiation · Soft skills
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Introduction
In recent years the attention of e-learning is progressively moving from the classical view, assuming that learning involves knowledge acquisition and transfer, with a main focus on hard skills, to a more comprehensive approach that involves the domain of soft skills training. Soft skills, also commonly referred as “people skills”, are personal attrib‐ utes or a cluster of personal traits that contribute to how people know and manage them‐ selves, as well as their relationships with others. They include skills such as proficiencies in the area of communication, conflict resolution and negotiation, leadership, and team building, to name a few. Today soft skills are recognized as transversal competencies existing in reciprocal relationship with hard skills, as it is testified by the numerous documents produced by the European Union about the enhancement of social and entre‐ preneurial skills (e.g. the Key Competences for Lifelong Learning [1]) and by the US Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology (ABET), which is explicitly demanding the improvement of soft skills training in the IT sector [2], with a particular focus on communication and negotiation skills. A crucial feature of soft competencies is that they can be assessed and developed through training, education and development programs. The most effective training © Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2015 G. Conole et al. (Eds.): EC-TEL 2015, LNCS 9307, pp. 441–446, 2015. DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-24258-3_37
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method for soft skills development is considered to be role-playing, usually performed by trainees face-to-face, with the guidance of a professional trainer acting as facilitator. In general terms, the act of “role-playing” describes an experience in which two or more people are involved in “as-if” or simulated actions and circumstances [3] that project participants into an imaginative-creative process established through the interpretation of a real or fictional role in a specific given situation. Derived from the psychodrama and sociodrama methods
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