Case Studies With A Twist

Case studies, whether in a face-to-face or live virtual world setting are a great way to get learners interacting with and applying content.

BUT – here’s a question and I’d like you to take a moment and consider your answer to this question before continuing to read this tip.

‘With a case study, where does the most learning take place?’

Take a moment and consider your answer.

I’m going to be a little controversial here and suggest that the most learning takes place during the creation of the case study – not the taking ie answering of the case study. The answering of the case study is pretty straight forward – you either know the answer or you don’t. However, to create the case study you need to have all the ins-and-outs of the content, to imagine a scenario and then be able to put that together as a coherent challenge for someone else. It’s during all that ‘playing‘ with the content to create the case study where the most learning is taking place.

So here’s a thought.

Why not get your learners to create the case studies? Provide them with all the resources, give them a set amount of time and task them with creating a case study.

Here’s how to do facilitate this activity

• Ask learner to form teams of 3 or 4 people per team (or create breakout rooms if it’s virtual training).
• Supply each team with resources eg documents, web links, videos etc.
• Give them the task of creating a case study for another team to answer.
• Set a time limit to research and create their case study – about 45-minutes.
• Allow teams to create their case study.
• Ask each team to rotate their case study to the next team.
• Each team now answers the case study they have just been given from another team.
• If you have more than 2 teams, the case study can be rotated again for the third group to evaluate the answer. If you only have 2 teams, then the case study can go back to the original team for evaluation.

So, with 3 or more teams, each team will have:

• created a case study
• answered one
• evaluated
  one

That means that they have been exposed to 3 different case studies and 3 different aspects of the content.

The great thing is, you (the designer and/or trainer) haven’t had to actually take the time to create the case study and chances are that the case studies created are more complex than you would have created.

Call to Action

The next time you want to have learners work through a case study, give it a twist and have your learners create the case study for another team to answer.