The CarriersEdge Podcast | Episode #104
Jane: Hey. Welcome to The CarriersEdge Podcast. This is episode 104. I'm Jane Jazrawy, Co-founder of CarriersEdge. And with me as always.
Mark: Your shopkeeper technician and general
Jane: Dog's body.
Mark: Mark Murrell
Jane: Do you love that word?
Mark: What was that word?
Jane: Dog's body. It's an old English British word. And I think it's like a dog's body is like kind of person who is just a regular servant and does everything. That they're just gonna do everything. So they'll do the cleaning of the floors and, you know, taking out the chamber pots and stuff like that. They're not the make the fires. They're not the they're not at the top of the totem pole.
Mark: In a world where there were chamber pots.
Jane: Yeah, well, that's why
Mark: You have a dog's body.
Jane: That's why we don't have dog's bodies anymore.
Mark: Yeah. We've evolved that role and it's called Gofer. Or intern?
Jane: Intern. Yes. It's an intern, but I like the word dog's body.
Mark: Okay. Well there I am.
Jane: I don't know where it comes from. I have to look up the etymology.
Mark: It does fit though.
Jane: Yes
Mark: All the various things that I am doing while we're recording these.
Jane: Oh, and and also the the self pity. You can't you can't forget.
Mark: Is that part of the job description as well?
Jane: What's that?
Mark: Is that part of the job description too?
Jane: Dogs body and self pitter, extraordinaire.
Mark: Okay. And there I am.
Jane: Welcome.
Mark: Welcome.
Jane: And I think I talked over you when you were saying your name. So say your name again.
Mark: Mark Murrell.
Jane: Welcome, Mark.
Mark: Yes. And what episode is this?
Jane: This is episode 104.
Mark: Yes. And we've got a few things to talk about. Well, we've got a starting point. And then we'll see where it goes from there.
Jane: Alright.
Mark: And the starting point is something that I am simultaneously interested in and always roll my eyes at.
Jane: And repelled by.
Mark: Yes. Interested and repelled. Much like the weather here where it is always both warm and cold at the same time. This is a subject that is repulse interesting. And it is gamification.
Jane: Yes. Gamification. The the way that all technology ends up being, you know, being encompassed into one word. And what is it? And how do you do it? And it's kind of over overkilled?
Mark: Yeah. Overused. So it's come up now because we've got a webinar this week where you're going to be talking about it.
Jane: Yes.
Mark: So you've been doing a little bit of research and thinking about it and you had some ideas that were quite interesting. So I think it's going to be a very interesting webinar. And what I am always interested in with these is cutting through the hype because everybody and their brother talks about gamification
Jane: Mhmm.
Mark: When it comes to education. And it's one of those things that I think people have to say or they feel like they have to say in order to be taken seriously or to be considered part of the cool kids.
Jane: It's like the theme word, like remember at Collision, then there was always
Mark: It was for crypto was for, like, everybody had to be crypto something and then it was AI something.
Jane: And there, you know, a few years ago, gamification was one of those words.
Mark: Oh, yeah. And it sort of cycled back.
Jane: You couldn't have any sort of learning that was
Mark: No.
Jane: At all effective
Mark: No, you can't be serious about learning at all
Jane: Yeah.
Mark: It must be a game.
Jane: Yes. Yeah. People are not capable of of learning anything unless it's it's got badges.
Mark: Mhmm.
Jane: And a leader board. So that is that is kinda how I've been thinking about it.
And, you know, when I when marketing first asked me to do this webinar, that was my, like, oh, god. Okay. We can we can talk about this and why it's not a good idea. But then I realized that if you look at it, so gamification is adding the elements of a game to learning. And game elements, you can look at game elements as like a real life game that you would play.
And so there's challenges, there's cooperative opportunities, there's competitive opportunities in a game. There's rules. There's scores. There and there's obviously a winner and a loser. And you could look at it that way, but a lot of what gamification is is they look at gaming. So they're looking at computer games like tech based games. And it is, you know, you achieve levels, you you can collect things, you can collect badges for achievements that you make while you are working towards these levels. And, you know, I play games. You don't really play games, but it this is pretty common. You have you'll start at level one and you level up. And this is this is all very common. So instead of looking at it in terms of badges for doing certain activities. So if you look at a carrier, a carrier might have a badge for doing a course. It's not super meaningful. And so what is the what is the point?
And what I've always thought about points and rewards and that kind of stuff is that unless it's just not really meaningful, gamification can be if you're just doing it to if you're just putting it on top of crappy training, it's still crappy training. You're not really motivating people to do anything. So that's why I haven't really liked it because I think it's something that people put on top of, like you put lipstick on a pig. You know, here we go. We've gamified it. And it doesn't really so
Mark: It's a cop out.
Jane: Kind of yeah.
Mark: Instead of solving the real problem, they're just trying to slap a bunch of blinking lights on it and then hopefully that that will snow people and they will just get excited by that and stop paying attention to the fact that it's actually a mess.
Jane: Part of and part of my issue with that is that it also becomes boring and repetitive.
Mark: Yeah. Oh, yay another badge. Yeah. Another thing.
Jane: So what do these things mean? And they often don't mean anything in real life, or maybe you can collect reward points to get, you know, a coffeemaker at some point.
Mark: So can I add on to that all of my reasons why I'm in the con camp or the
Jane: Sure?
Mark: The nay.
Jane: I suppose I should let you speak at some point.
Mark: We can do that and then you can take everybody through your process that you went through and your thinking some of the things that you've come up with, which I actually think are really good approaches to it. So I'll start with the reasons why I have not been a fan of gamification, why I tend to be repulsed by the idea. There are many and I'll try and get them into some sort of logical order, but I think you touched on it a little bit where it's a distraction. It's sort of that it's a way to, you know, lipstick on a pig as you put it, to hide garbage content or to distract from the fact that there really isn't a purpose to the education. So I find it a bit patronizing.
If I'm a professional and I wanna learn how to do this job better, don't make education into some sort of preschool toy. I don't like, that doesn't help me. That just tells me that you don't take this seriously. That that you don't think I'm a professional. I'm a professional.
I wanna learn how to do this job better. I want the information that I need in order to get better at it. And gamification is just a distraction. It just gets in the way and it clutters it. But it also, the point that you made off the top about board games or other types of games is there's a winner. And when there's a winner, there's a bunch of people that aren't winners. And that's not really what professional development is about.
Jane: Mhmm.
Mark: And as an organization, it shouldn't be about one person. Yes, the argument on the other side is that we're inherently competitive people. And if somebody wins something, then everybody else is gonna wanna beat them and there is some truth to that. But
Jane: But actually, I would I would argue that is that I am not there's a lot of people who aren't interested in that.
Mark: Mhmm.
Jane: And or lose interest really quick, or start out having interest until they start not being at the top, and then they don't wanna do it anymore.
Mark: Well, it very much appeals to those type a who are very competitive and want to beat everybody. But if that's not what you have in your workforce and if that's not aligned with the skill set that creates success in the business, then that really is missing the point. You're ending up incenting the wrong things. So I'm not really a fan of that kind of gamification. I think it's a distraction. I think it's patronizing. And I think it usually gets in the way of actual collaborative professional development.
Jane: I do think that the whole idea of competition is a good idea to do as a one off or something to do not every day. Like, not on a regular basis, something that is unusual. So if you have a contest, or if you have a, like, some sort of event where it's competitive, so that people who are competitive can get, you know, can get that sense that they're winning or putting themselves against their peers. That's, you know, I have no problem with that. It's just that you can't be doing that all the time and think that everybody is gonna respond because that's just not the way it is. Some people will definitely respond, but then others won't. And you don't know because it will depend on the subject matter as well
Mark: Yeah.
Jane: About whether people will really want to go for it or not go for it. There are people who are generally like to compete in everything that they do, and you can always put some element in there, but you don't need to make it about that.
Mark: Yeah. Yeah. I would agree with that for sure. Well, it's also one of those things where it can't be can't be all the time because, like you say, loses the novelty.
Jane: Yeah.
Mark: And, you know, that ends up being sort of counterproductive. It ends up not really not really getting you that the real bang that you want from it. Especially when everybody uses it for everything. Like, everything is called gamification. If you can do better in any way, if there's any element might be enjoyable if there's any element that you get in exchange for doing anything. Somebody's gonna call it gamified. And it doesn't necessarily mean that it actually is, but it kind of waters down the idea and loses all meaning when everybody uses the same word for everything. And then people try and gamify everything under the sun. It just totally takes away from it.
Jane: Yeah. And there's different types of games and there's different types of activities that you can do. You know, you have to try and figure out what your goal is as well. Like, with with the traditional sort of gamification, here's your your slap on a badge and give yourself some points. What's the overall goal? Like, what are you trying to do with this? Because you need to have that. They're always, with training, you always have to have some sort of goal that's you know, that needs to be achieved or you're going to work towards achieving. And that when you do that, then you start realizing that that gamification without any other without any other thought is gonna be kinda useless. Well, not useless, but it's gonna be boring.
Mark: It's only gonna get you so far. Badges will only get you so far. And I see this in the video game industry where people have Well, where they really started with this whole idea of badges and achievements and levels. And in the beginning, it's really exciting and it's really popular. But it burns out over time.
Jane: Yeah. Like, if you go back to the game that I was addicted to, because I am very addicted to games. I I am yeah. I'm addicted to right now this form of solitaire where you're supposed to be able to win money, but you really can't. It's like two cents that you can win, but I was really addicted to Candy Crush. And so the first I don't know. Maybe 50 levels are interesting. And then they're not.
Mark: Right.
Jane: And then it doesn't matter.
Mark: Yeah.
Jane: Like, I'm on level, like, five thousand and something, I think, in Candy Crush. I don't know, because I haven't opened I deleted it from my phone. I cannot I'm too addicted.
I'm an alcoholic with Candy Crush. I will just go back into it.
Mark: But those badges just become less valuable to you. Right? You were told for different reasons, but that's one of the games that I was thinking of. Another one was Pokémon. When Pokémon Go came out, it was huge. Everybody was all over it, and it was a great use of augmented reality to go out and do these Pokémon events and things and get badges and collect your Pokémon and all of that kind of stuff. You don't see a lot of people doing it anymore. It was great for a little bit and then it gets stale.
Jane: Yeah. Because there's only so much to the game that you can keep creating.
Mark: That's fresh.
Jane: Yeah.
Mark: If it isn't something that has intrinsic value that you continue to value personally, then it loses all of that luster.
Jane: And you will only have a couple of people really, you know, kind of participate.
Mark: You have a few hardcore people that are always in there. But then you don't have a broader appeal. You can't continue to bring new people into it.
Jane: Yes. But the people who are in it, love it. And what you need and I think what you need to do or what companies need to do is if you wanna use a type of gamification, then you have to figure out what people value.
Mark: And will continue to value. Not just value right now as I, oh, this is cool the first time. But what are they going to still value the tenth time they get it?
Jane: Exactly.
Mark: Which comes down to the same thing every time.
Jane: Now
Mark: Well, now we've articulated all the problems.
Jane: Yes. These are all the problems.
Mark: Right.
Jane: Also the good things.
Mark: And so let me come back to the thing that is gonna be the value that people always see value in or the prize that people always see value in ends up always being money. Or something that they're they can always use more of paid time off, money, something like that. So that kind of leads into Here are some of the positives or the ways to take advantage of it that we were talking about after you did some some thinking and then did some research.
Jane: Yeah, I was reading a couple of things about what gamification really is because I was kind of thinking about it in terms of how to motivate people during an activity or during during training. And I think that's the way a lot of, you know, old timer learning experts think of it because it has been, like, forever, you're always trying to engage people in learning. That that's, like, one of the number one things. That's what ice icebreakers quote unquote are supposed to be is, like, a fun thing to do, but you're supposed to try and incorporate activities and things that you can do to practice in any kind of training online, offline or or classroom doesn't really matter. So when I started realizing that the idea of gamification is really about this kind of structure, I started thinking realizing that it's also to do with achievement. And I think if we start looking at gamification in terms of achievement, not so much measuring. So scorecards, in trucking scorecards are used to measure everything.
Mark: And people often say that their scorecard, they've gamified performance by having a scorecard, but they haven't
Jane: but not really because there's no real achievement. So, basically, you get your bonus or you don't get your bonus and that's how drivers look at the scorecard is it's their bonus tracking.
Mark: And they basically reset every month.
Jane: Yeah.
Mark: It's like you go back to zero at the beginning of the month.
Jane: And you can get perfect scores and whatever on your scorecard. But when you have a mix of different skill sets in the company, then how valid is that gonna be? So what I think that if you wanna look at gamification in a way that's actually going to encourage people to want to do things is create a program a voluntary program or it could be a mandatory program. I think voluntary would be good to start with where it combines career, professional development, and content that you want or activities that you want people to practice. So it could be it could be online training. It can be simulator practice. It can be hands on practice. It can be a coaching session, it whatever it is that you want them to do for a specific it can be to do with a specific type of activity. So maybe there's a whole bunch of practice in backing or there's a whole bunch of practice in maneuvering around a yard and fixed object, avoidance and things like that. I don't know or could be wellness.
It could be so if you have a theme. And this is kind of what I'm always talking about is try and figure out a theme to your training for six months or a quarter so that people kind of understand that everything is going to be surrounding this theme and it's easier to get in, get kind of engaged in it. So if you say you have a program for wellness. And that program can be I'm going to adjust my diet somehow. I am going to get coaching from a fitness expert, you know, or the company wellness coach.
I'm going to do two online courses about about this topic. I'm gonna go to the gym five or six times. And then once you think you have completed all of those things, then you have an achievement.
Mark: Mhmm.
Jane: And that achievement will get you something else.
Mark: Okay.
Jane: So you've collected, you've done all the things, you've learned a whole lot, you've practiced some of this, And then on top of it, you're going to be recognized. And maybe you're recognized because, you know, you've got your wellness level one.
Mark: Mhmm.
Jane: And that can be a symbol on a shirt or a on a hat or something like that that you get something tangible for that, you get that reward. Because one of the things about drivers and this is why I'm talking about gamification a little bit differently, is that they don't really want the online recognition.
Mark: Right. Yeah. A badge in some app that they log into once a month or even once a week. Really not that significant.
Jane: But something they can put on their truck.
Mark: Oh, yeah.
Jane: That's something else.
Mark: Something that they can sew into their jacket. Well
Jane: Or get a jacket and then have other things that go on to it.
Mark: Part of what you're sort of getting to there is that it isn't temporary. It's a permanent thing. No matter what else happens, you've achieved wellness level one.
Jane: Yes.
Mark: You will always have that versus the quote unquote gamification of scorecards where yeah, you got this score this month but that doesn't really mean anything. Because next month, you start at zero again.
Jane: Right.
Mark: You start back at, you know, the default. So the achievement side of it is something that is not just tangible, but long lasting, more permanent.
Jane: Yeah. And that is something that is in games as well. I mean, when I am addicted to solitaire games and one of the things that they would it's like almost like side games.
Mark: Mhmm.
Jane: So there's like the normal everyday things that you have to do every, you know, do all the time. But then the the side side things where you can, you know, you can get them. So I could just play solitaire every day or I could go into this side game and compete.
Mark: Mhmm.
Jane: And it's like more of a little competition then I realized
Mark: Like a side quest or something. Go and do things and then go back.
Jane: Yeah. You don't have to, but you can choose to and you'll get rewarded in the game. You're not gonna get anything taken away. You're just gonna get that reward.
Mark: That would be really cool. That would be an amazing program for a fleet to have for the drivers is these side quest kind of things in addition to the normal safety programs and training programs have these voluntary things periodically. That people can go and do that are gonna help them, help the company, and get them something.
Jane: Well, you can give them recognition, you can do social posting recognition, you can award a certificate, you can give them something else that's valuable, and maybe you know, maybe the achievement is something as simple as, you know, improvement over the last six months or something like that or setting a goal and then doing things to to achieve a goal and then getting that achievement, but sending achievements and then tying it to a reward or an increase in pay. So if you want to do an increase in pay, you can, I mean, you can do the things that you have to do to get an achievement, can be whatever you want. So you could do something. If you want it to be tied to pay, then make sure that when someone is has completed these things. They're gonna be doing their job better.
Mark: Mhmm.
Jane: So coaching
Mark: Designing these things will be tricky.
Jane: Yeah. And that's the thing is is designing them is definitely tricky, but you have to think about it as what you want the behaviors to be. Well, you could do it as a general. As a general program. And I haven't really thought about the nuts and bolts because I'm just trying I was thinking about it in generalities, but if you wanna do a general achievement that you're just generally gonna be a better driver after you do all of these things. So think of all the training that you would like someone to do.
Mark: Well, I'll also stop on that for a second.
Jane: Okay.
Mark: What is a better driver at this specific fleet?
Jane: Exactly.
Mark: Specifically, what constitutes that? And everybody's gonna say, oh, they got a perfect safety record. But, okay, you're always after that anyway. But here, this particular company operating this equipment in these lanes, serving these customers, what does better actually look like intangible specific things? Which as you're talking about it is making me realize this is one of the reasons why there will never be an out of the box system that does this for you because it is, for each company, something that has to be customized for their culture and their business.
Jane: Well, what I was thinking the other thing that I was thinking when I was considering gamification is how you can use our system to do it.
Mark: Yeah. We support a lot of these pieces, but you've gotta put them together in a way that fits that business.
Jane: Yeah. I don't wanna make it. I don't think that it should be about, you know, completing seven online courses.
Mark: No.
Jane: That's not an achievement. Doing extra training is something to be rewarded, but what is the goal of that? So when you set up the program or you set up the the achievement, what is it that you want them to do? So if it's maybe it's like a safe driving level one, safe driving level two, but have things that are not just online training associated with it? Have that you have to do some mentoring. Like, maybe if you have a if you have a, you know, someone who has been in the job for thirty years, then maybe part of the achievement is you do an hour of mentoring for two months with a new driver.
Mark: Or you share either through documenting or doing a video or something your top five tips. Or the things that you've learned that you would have liked to know thirty years ago or things that you've learned about how to serve this particular customer or what to do when driving through one particular neighborhood. Those kind of things that are very tricky.
Jane: Or attend a driver advisory board meeting.
Mark: Mhmm.
Jane: Or, you know, be you know, do it for a year. So that's an achievement is being able to, you know, kind of commit to doing something for the company, for a certain amount of time, or, you know, put have input on particular things. And but but it should also go along with training and it should go along with coaching. There's should be like some back and forth where you don't just, you know, throw out some kind of garbage. It's something that is it has to be is something that's valued and something that you kind of have a pass fail on.
Mark: Yeah. It has to have some value for the organization.
Jane: And but also value an intrinsic value as well. So there are so each company can think about it might be behavior related. So maybe it's, you know, I was thinking about weight loss, but also, you know, getting fit, but also speaking up in meetings. Or speaking up in or doing surveys or like, just kind of any kind of behavior on the road and off the road that you want to reward.
Mark: This is making me think on the idea of the achievements and that kind of thing and rewarding certain things, rewarding certain levels of achievement. It's making me think of the companies that have their own kind of smaller version of the truck driving championships or the rodeos.
Jane: Yeah.
Mark: Where they will create an obstacle course or some particularly challenging thing that people have to do to demonstrate their skills operating the vehicle. And through that, they get achievements they get recognized that way. And that definitely gives people something to work towards, but also is something that's going to help the company because the people that have those skills are not going to be having as many problems in tight spaces.
They're not banging into as many things.
Jane: The other thing that I was thinking was that it could also be the speed of which people do things.
Mark: Mhmm.
Jane: So if you, you won't wanna do it with online training, because online education is a big one for gamification. So maybe it's how many people finish a monthly assignment. So if you're gonna do monthly assignments, which I don't like. But if you're gonna do it, then how quickly do they finish them?
Mark: Mhmm.
Jane: Do they wait for the last minute? Are they, you know, do they do it within the first week? So don't make it a race because making it a race is
Mark: Don't make it who gets it done first. No. But making it based on the weeks. That's a good way to do it.
Jane: Do you do it in the first half of the month? If you do it in the first half of the month of the first week for six months? That's an achievement.
Mark: Yeah.
Jane: That and that's also something that could be measured by our system. It's gonna tell you who's you know, who's done what, when, so you can see, and you can do a report based on that.
Mark: And the value for the business in getting people to do that stuff sooner is first off, you separate your diligent people from your laggards. But secondly, you start to get that data in there about how long are people taking to do this? What scores are they getting? What places do we need to follow-up to make sure they understand it? All of those kind of things.
Jane: Well, I will tell you say, you say, okay. If you do it in the first week of the month for six months, then, you know, you'll get some sort of reward. People will start telling you why they can't do it. No. And I'm not saying I'm not saying they're doing it as an excuse.
You'll start hearing about the issues that people are having either.
Mark: Legitimate issues.
Jane: Yeah. Like, the system is down. I'm like, I'm in the middle of you know, a crazy a crazy delivery right now. I can't do it. You know, it
Mark: Which just a pause on that is why you say we're gonna reward based on the first two weeks of the month or the first week of the month rather than we're gonna reward the first person who does it.
Jane: Yeah. Oh god, the first person who does it
Mark: They may be off. They may be busy. Maybe they shouldn't be pulling out all the stops to finish in the first day, but at some point during the first couple of weeks, get it done.
Jane: Yeah. And then but you will hear about barriers. And then when you hear about barriers, that's gonna help you address those barriers as well.
Mark: Absolutely.
Jane: And then you don't have to have, like so I think that's a pretty low bar doing your monthly assignment within the first half of the month. For six months or a year. Six months, three months, maybe. You may wanna do it every three months so that you have, like, it happening all the time or do it as a a year long thing where you do it every three months and then there's four prizes awarded, and then there's an overall prize or something like that. But then you have smaller rewards for smaller achievements. So doing a monthly assignment that somebody has already told you you have to do, you're just gonna be diligent about it, should be a smaller reward. Like give them a hat or give them a jacket or or not a jacket, but give them a t shirt. But as people do things that are deemed more difficult, So, say, you have to do two online courses within three months and come in for simulator practice twice from winter driving or whatever.
Mark: Contribute two ideas at a driver meeting.
Jane: Yeah. There's there's a winter driving achievement. And then what you can do if you want to in our system that you can put all these achievements in a program. And then have that program be your way of tracking what achievements everybody has had.
Mark: Yeah. That's a nice approach. It's also making me think when you were talking earlier about the quarterly theme and having the theme of something you mentioned, wellness for this quarter and a different theme, next quarter. That's something that we've talked about a fair bit in the ideal structure of the program where you would have a theme for the quarter And month one, you have maybe a course in month two, you have some social media thing in month three, you do something in person. You have a variety of things that are all related to that subject. For that quarter, whatever that quarter's theme is. But that also gives you the foundation for recognition programs and something that you can recognize at the end of the year, the best performance in this theme of the quarter, put it all together. And each of those could be leveling up achievement. Absolutely. If you've got a quarterly theme that can be tied to achievements, and it can be the foundation for things that you recognize at the end of the year.
Because we always see fleets trying to find ways that they can recognize drivers for good performance, and they tend to just stick with driver the month based on scorecard, driver the year based on safety and fuel performance and like pretty old school things where they are not getting very creative. And I think there are lots of opportunities to tie things together that people don't really think about. Right? Don't create a recognition program out of thin air that's totally disconnected from everything else. Base it on the things that you're doing.
So start with a quarterly theme, build some achievements around that, and then at the end of the year, you recognize the people that have the most achievements or people that have the best performance in different areas. The nice thing about achievements is that you can have more than one winner. You can have any number of people win them. Or accomplish them, I guess, not winning them.
Jane: Yes.
Mark: And that's gonna be a much better approach than trying to turn it into some sort of a game or a challenge or some sort of patronizing way of saying, we don't trust you to do this. So we have to try and turn it into I don't know, a game of Monopoly or something.
Jane: Yeah. And and patterning it on an actual game is
Mark: Mhmm.
Jane: I mean, I've already I've done enough jeopardy style
Mark: Yeah.
Jane: Things that I mean, it's cute-ish.
Mark: But the blinking lights and and all the bells and everything get to be a lot after a while.
Jane: Well, they're also more expensive. I mean, that when you wanna build that stuff in, it's just gonna cost a lot more you can have all kinds of gamification, but, you know, it it costs is basically it. You wanna spend more money on something that you're gonna have change in five minutes when the regulations change?
Mark: Which is it's funny. Every time I get into a discussion with, like, a a quote unquote real e learning person who tends to be somebody outside of trucking and we talk about what you can and can't do, I always smile about that because the e learning people outside of trucking are doing all kinds of things that can be really interesting. And they can be doing these kind of adventure type games and choose your own ending sort of training courses, and fantastic stuff. But the reality is none of that will fly in the trucking industry. For the simple reason that it's too expensive to build, and it takes too long to update it.
So when we talk and I talk about the things that I'm doing or things that we've got built into our courses, how we do it. They kind of say, well, you know, it's fairly basic. It's fairly simplistic. And I'm like, yeah. But the regs change all the time.
And you gotta have something that you can update fast. You can't take six months to update it. You gotta be able to get it done quickly, and it needs to run on a slow connection. Because these are not an audience of people that are sitting in an office with 5G and better connections on brand new machines. They're on older machines and slower connections.
They're out in the middle of nowhere. And they just got rid of 3G. How are you gonna have your fully rendered, full screen, animated, choose your own adventure e learning course on those kind of that kind of technology. It's just gonna be nothing but lag and drive people crazy.
Jane: Well, the other thing is is that as soon as you get really super creative like that, like, choose your own adventure and the regs change, then it's well, also sometimes complicated regs and sometimes the motivation for getting through the course is just to understand them.
Mark: Yeah.
Jane: You know, I don't you you don't need to you don't need to play a game to understand hours of service. If there was a if there was an easy game like a nursery rhyme that would help you remember all the exceptions to hours of service and how to calculate all of that stuff, somebody would have already done it.
Mark: Yeah. Twenty years ago.
Jane: Yeah. It it's just it's just complicated. And when you have complicated content, then you can't have too much in the way of games. You can do a lot of scenario based stuff. But actual games, it's it's hard to build in.
Mark: Yeah. It's extremely challenging to not confuse the material with your story line.
Jane: Well, if you have a storyline like this is the other thing.
Mark: Yeah. Whatever your game storyline is or your great interactive idea that you've come up with, it's way too easy for that to confuse the content and end up having learners that are in worse shape at the end of the course than they were at the beginning.
Jane: And the other the other point to make about e learning outside the trucking industry is there's a lot of soft skills. Actually, in the trucking industry, not non driving.
Mark: Right.
Jane: Because a lot of e learning is about communication and project management and other types of management and things like that. And in that, you know, simulation and choose your own adventure and that kind of thing, when you're having a conversation like a sales conversation or a difficult conversation or something like that, that kind of training, yeah, that's gonna be that's gonna be fantastic. Difficult conversations kinda you can think of a bunch of examples and they don't really change.
Mark: Yeah. The material is not gonna be changing every couple of years.
Jane: Yeah. You try and do something around hazardous materials and, you know, when you transport them and I don't know what kind of interactivity you wanna have with your shipping document and your placards, but
Mark: Yeah.
Jane: You know, you don't wanna make I've seen approaches where, you know, people have wanted to make the placard into a cartoon character or but that doesn't really do anything to help you remember how to figure out what placard goes on your goes on your truck
Mark: No. It just patronizes the audience, by trying to turn it into like a nursery rhyme or like some sort of preschool adventure.
Jane: So the gamification comes from your achievements, and it also comes from the other activities that you can do to help people solidify the learning. So maybe you know, one of the things that you do is role play or a choose your own adventure or something like that. I think simulators are a great partner to elearning because that's your choose your own adventure.
Mark: Yep.
Jane: You can hit something.
Mark: Yeah.
Jane: You can choose to hit it. You can choose to see, you know, how you can, you know, bang into the deer and you know, like, winter driving, this is a great example if you wanted to do an achievement for winter driving a level. You know, level one winter driving is do two sessions on the simulator and do a, you know, two modules of a course and, you know, something else, like, talk to the shop or go have a session with maintenance and see what kinds of things that they do to because that's the other thing that you can do with an achievement is you can make it about learning about the other parts of the company.
So maybe that's what you do. And then not only will they so the the e learning is going to help them with the knowledge the hands-on practice is gonna help them use that knowledge. And a simulator is going to be kind of your choose your own adventure or even your competitiveness where, you know, what kinds of scores are you gonna get?
Mark: Mhmm.
Jane: And, you know, how how long can you stay on the yeah. Because it's basically a simulator will give you scores.
Mark: Yep.
Jane: Instead of trying to build everything into the same application use the different tools that you have to build to build a program that's engaging.
Mark: Yeah. Okay. Well, we've solved gamification now. So moving on
Jane: I don't think we've solved it, but we've
Mark: I'm being somewhat facetious.
Jane: We've given, here's some ideas.
Mark: Yes. You also have a radio thing coming up this week. Don't you? Are you doing a Nemo show?
Jane: Probably, I don't know what I'm talking about though.
Mark: Oh, okay.
Jane: I have to think about that. I've been thinking about graphics, and I've been thinking about gamification. So with the graphics stuff, I'm we're doing we've released a TDG fuel. And
Mark: Finally, after many, many years,
Jane: I'm pretty sure we've released it. Yeah. We've released the English version and the French is coming out.
Mark: Yes, people have taken it because we were looking at that last week.
Jane: Yeah.
Mark: So this is a a monumental achievement of its own because I think what was the the course ID we were looking at is something like 960.
Jane: I created that course a very long time ago because I had all kinds
Mark: Our current courses are in the 25,000 range IDs. So this was a very, very long time ago we initially started on this, but the challenge was always finding sufficient customer partners to work with to get clear information on what really happens, what a day in the life of a fuel hauler is really like. And specifically, what they need to do related to the dangerous goods regulations when they're hauling fuel. So, it took a while, but it is finally done and looks good. It's got some very cool parts to it. Very nice graphics and animation in there.
Jane: Well, yes, because Berenice did a a fabulous job on the movement of fuel while you're rounding
Mark: Ah yes, the liquid.
Jane: As you drive
Mark: Yes.
Jane: And that you know, that was tricky because she was doing 3D, but she was so she's animating the waves that happened inside the inside the tanker. And I think that was a it was a bit of a like, she hadn't done that before. She hadn't animated liquid.
Mark: Yeah.
Jane: So it was it was a learning curve for her, but it turned out
Mark: That's not easy.
Jane: And it turned out very nicely.
Mark: Yeah.
Jane: It it really did. But that's only one part of it. The other part and this is very boring for everybody but me. But the shipping papers.
Mark: The headache of that shipping document.
Jane: Oh my god. It is the hugest document. It it's like got so much information on it that it's a real challenge to figure out how to display. Like, how do you teach a document? This is the other thing about gamification. Like, where how am I gonna teach someone how to fill out a document and make it a game?
Mark: Yeah.
Jane: Like it's you're filling out the document. Like, just can we just fill it out correctly? So I always start with how do you do it correctly and then kind of figure out how to layer on something else that's interesting. But my issue is that because this document is so big, I don't really have room. On on a page to to have the entire thing.
And our screen size is we're kind of leaving it relatively small because of the screen size of of different machines and mobile and that kind of thing. So changing the changing the layout is a challenge. So what I was doing was trying to figure out how to not necessarily have all of this text in an image because as monitors and phones and other devices get more get nicer, like, get more high density, it because images become gravely. Like, they look grainy, and and they're not very nice. So I don't really wanna have everything in an image because it's also too small to look at.
So how do I do this? And I've been kind of experimenting with different things over the last couple of weeks. Like, right now, the shipping document is a ship. It's it's small text. But I want to change that so that it's so that the text that you're looking at is clear and big enough to read.
Mark: Yeah. That's the challenge is you wanna show the entire document So people have a sense of the context and what the whole thing looks like. And then when you get into the detailed sections, they have a sense of where those are. But if you show the whole document, it needs to be so tiny that no human can read it.
Jane: Yeah.
Mark: And then
Jane: Then you have to do it in French.
Mark: Yeah. Making it even worse.
Jane: It has to be even more tiny.
Mark: Yeah. So you have these challenges to face. So I think the solution that you come up with where you have an abstract version of it that shows the main sections and then you drill down into detail that show what's actually there. I think that works really nicely.
Jane: Yeah. I'm thinking about putting a link where you can look at the whole document if you want to. So I have been that's been kind of churning in my head, so I have to figure out what I'm gonna say to Dave. What I'm gonna talk about to Dave.
Mark: Well, related to documents and particularly dangerous goods, one of the longtime challenges that we've had in our product, there wasn't an easy answer for a long time. There still isn't an easy answer, but we are finally tackling this challenge. That is the third party links that you put in all of these courses. So content builds these courses, puts all of these links to outside locations, different sites, reference material, go here for more information, really gives a nice bit of additional context around the subjects that you're talking about and sometimes goes to the actual regulations or, like, a more detailed document if people want that. The challenge is that so many of our customers lock down their networks and they're putting these courses out to their drivers through their ELDs or through other devices that are locked down, drivers can't access most of those links.
So we have all of these links that people go to tap them or click them and they get, sorry, the link is not available on this device. And we've never liked that.
Jane: No.
Mark: It's always been headache.
Jane: It's not good.
Mark: And we could give people give customers a list of all of the different sites they need to white list, but the list would be a mile and a half long. And it would need to be updated all the time. So that's not a real answer. So we've been working on this for a while, trying to figure out what are we gonna do here. There is probably an answer, but somebody needs to spend some time on it and it's gonna take some time to do it. Well, we are finally tackling that. So what we are going to do is basically store all of those things locally. So we're gonna scrape all of these sites get local copies of these things basically like the way back machine does on the Internet archive or what Google is doing when they scrape. And create the cache of their own. So we'll have all of that stuff and it will get served out through our site directly. It's a challenge. Is not an easy thing to build, not an easy thing to figure out how to design and get running reliably. But once it's done, it will make links a lot more accessible for drivers that are on all of these lockdown networks. The other advantage is when these government websites up and change their content and break these links, which is what happens now. They move things around. So all of a sudden, the link that you're pointing to either isn't there or it's there, but it's something different.
That won't be an issue for the end user. It will be only an issue that we have to catch on the back end to do maintenance, but and user will still see the same content because we will have cashed it locally.
Jane: That's nice.
Mark: Yeah. So it's a challenge. It's lot of R and D work that we're putting into it, but it's going to make things a lot nicer for people.
Jane: Oh. Very cool. Especially if you have to go to an external site to I don't know, do something that is like a part of the course.
Mark: Yeah.
Jane: So we have a couple of non non driving courses where you do a self assessment beforehand, and it's on a different website. So that will be useful.
Mark: Mhmm. So I think with that, we can bring this to a close and wrap up the episode today.
Jane: Okay. Thanks
Mark: Thanks for listening everybody.
Jane: Bye.