8 Best eLearning Examples (Scenario-Based and AI-Powered)
By Devlin Peck · Updated
Part of the eLearning Design & Development guide
The best eLearning examples drop you into a realistic situation, ask you to make real decisions, and let the consequences do the teaching. Below are the eight I recommend studying: five scenario-based classics that have held up for years, plus three AI-powered simulations, two of which you can play right here in this article. For each one, I break down why it works so you can steal the same moves when designing effective eLearning of your own.
Ever since I got into this field, I knew I wanted to work on scenario-based projects and simulations. They were so much more fun for me than traditional, information-heavy eLearning, and every example on this list earns its spot the same way: by making the learner do something instead of read something.
What makes a great eLearning example?
A great eLearning example puts the learner in a realistic situation, asks them to make real decisions, and responds with believable consequences instead of "Correct!" popups. Every example below should pass this test; here are the criteria I used to pick them:
- Realistic decisions. The choices mirror what people actually face on the job (or in life).
- Intrinsic consequences. A wrong move produces an angry customer, a bigger pile of bad debt, or a patient in trouble. The story reacts to the learners' choices.
- Story and character. People with names, motives, and distinct dialogue. This is what pulled me toward scenario-based work in the first place.
- Built from actions (not information). Each one starts with what the learner needs to do, the same thinking behind Cathy Moore's action mapping approach.
- Sound multimedia design. Clean visuals and no redundant narration reading the screen at you. If you can speak fluently about Mayer's multimedia principles and use them to justify your decisions, you will stand out, because a lot of instructional designers still violate them. Good visual design for eLearning can make or break the learning experience.
Create characters with distinct dialogue, immerse people in tough situations, and have them make the same choices & experience the same consequences that they would in the real world.Devlin Peck
What are the best scenario-based eLearning examples?
The five best scenario-based eLearning examples I have found are Shady Sam, The Uber Game, Payback, Heart Class, and Connect with Haji Kamal. i've also included three new AI-powered simulations to bring us to the full list of eight:
| # | Example | Creator | Format | Skill practiced | Why it stands out | Where to try it |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Shady Sam | Next Gen Personal Finance | Browser game (role reversal) | Reading loan terms | You play the predatory lender, so the fine print becomes the gameplay | shadysam.com |
| 2 | The Uber Game | Financial Times | Narrative news game | Gig-economy money decisions | Journalism-grade realism built on FT reporting | ig.ft.com/uber-game |
| 3 | Payback | Next Gen Personal Finance | Simulation | College financing tradeoffs | Multi-variable tradeoffs, no single right answer | timeforpayback.com |
| 4 | Heart Class | UNIT9 / Martin Percy | Interactive film | CPR under pressure | Tested with 600+ students; "90% more effective than traditional techniques" per UNIT9 | unit9.com |
| 5 | Connect with Haji Kamal | Cathy Moore & Kinection | Branching scenario | Cross-cultural communication | Consequences carry forward through every branch | Cathy Moore's blog |
| 6 | Handle with Care | Sabrina Gonzales | Storyline 360 + AI conversation sim | Manager coaching conversations | Open conversation instead of answer choices | Playable below |
| 7 | Brushstrokes & Lies | Sabrina Gonzales | AI investigation sim | Investigative questioning | Learners write their own questions | Playable below |
| 8 | Inside the Call | Sabrina Gonzales | AI voice simulation | Customer service calls | Live voice calls with SCORM reporting | Live demo |
I originally walked through the classic five in this video, if you would rather watch the breakdowns:
1. Shady Sam (NGPF)
Shady Sam flips personal finance education on its head: you play a loan shark whose job is to squeeze as much money as possible out of desperate borrowers. Every loan you structure teaches you exactly how terms, rates, and fees hurt the person signing.
Why it works: perspective-taking. Playing the villain forces you to understand the mechanics of predatory lending far more deeply than a lesson warning you about them ever could. The feedback is intrinsic too. Your score is the harm you cause, which lands with an uncomfortable weight that no quiz can match.
2. The Uber Game (Financial Times)
The Uber Game puts you behind the wheel as a full-time Uber driver trying to make ends meet for your family over a single grueling week. It was built by the Financial Times on real reporting about gig-economy economics.
Why it works: constrained resources create empathy. You are constantly trading sleep, family time, and vehicle costs against the fares you need, and the numbers never quite add up. It proves that a "boring" topic like unit economics becomes gripping when it is somebody's rent on the line.
3. Payback (NGPF)
Payback simulates the financial side of attending college. You make decision after decision about loans, work, housing, and social life while the sim tracks your debt alongside your focus, happiness, and connections.
Why it works: multi-variable tradeoffs. There is no single right answer, because minimizing debt at all costs wrecks your wellbeing, and coasting on loans buries you at graduation. This is what real decisions look like, and most eLearning is afraid to model it.
4. Heart Class (UNIT9 / Martin Percy)
Heart Class is an interactive film by director Martin Percy and UNIT9, made with cardiovascular physician Dr. Lorrel Brown Toft and inspired by the Resuscitation Council UK's Lifesaver. You are pulled into a cardiac emergency and have to make CPR decisions in real time, with the film responding to each choice.
Why it works: high-pressure fidelity plus measured outcomes. This is the only example on the list with published effectiveness data: per UNIT9's project page, testing with more than 600 US high school students found it "90% more effective than traditional techniques for teaching kids CPR." Cinematic production is not the lesson here; the lesson is that the drama serves the decisions, not the other way around.
5. Connect with Haji Kamal (Cathy Moore & Kinection)
Connect with Haji Kamal, designed by Cathy Moore with Kinection, has you guide a young US Army lieutenant through a high-stakes meeting with an influential Afghan leader. Every dialogue choice shifts the relationship, and missteps compound as the conversation branches.
Why it works: consequences carry forward. A weak choice early on does not end the scenario; it makes the rest of the conversation harder, exactly like real interpersonal communication. There is minimal telling and maximal doing, with culture notes available if you want them rather than forced on you up front.
What do AI-powered eLearning examples look like?
Instead of pre-scripted branches, AI-powered eLearning examples let learners speak or type in their own words while an AI character responds naturally and an AI evaluator scores the conversation against criteria the designer defines. When I polled a group of instructional designers in 2026 on the hardest part of building scenario-based eLearning, branching complexity came out on top, with build time and making it feel realistic close behind. Those are exactly the constraints AI conversation simulations remove: there is no branch map to maintain, because the character can respond to anything.
Full disclosure before we dig in: all three examples below were built by Sabrina Gonzales, an instructional designer on my team, using devlin.ai, my AI conversation simulation builder. I obviously have a stake here, so if you want a more neutral comparison, see my guide on evaluating AI simulation tools for your team. Still, these projects show what the category looks like better than anything else I could point you to, and two of them are embedded below so you can judge for yourself.
6. Handle with Care (Sabrina Gonzales)
Handle with Care puts managers through two coaching conversations with an underperforming employee, built in Storyline 360 with devlin.ai powering the conversations. There are no answer choices. You say what you would actually say, the employee reacts believably, and outcomes range "from breakthrough to resignation" depending on how you handle it.
Why it works: the conversation is the interaction. Rapport-building, tone, and timing all matter, and the sim evaluates how you handled the whole exchange rather than whether you clicked option B. Try the conversation yourself. This is the actual sim, not a video of it:
7. Brushstrokes & Lies (Sabrina Gonzales)
Brushstrokes & Lies is an investigative mystery where you play a detective interrogating two AI suspects in an art heist, with up to ten original questions for each. At the end, AI-generated feedback breaks down how well you questioned them.
Why it works: open-ended questioning is something branching literally cannot do. Asking good questions is a skill in dozens of jobs (auditing, discovery calls, incident investigation, medical intake), and no pre-written option list can assess whether you asked the right thing. Step into the interrogation room here:
8. Inside the Call (Sabrina Gonzales)
Inside the Call is a CRM customer-service simulation with live AI voice calls, built with devlin.ai handling the voice conversations and SCORM reporting. You navigate the software while a customer talks to you, and you answer out loud.
Why it works: voice is what makes the simulation. Customer service does not happen in multiple choice; it happens in real time, with a person's tone in your ear while you find the right screen. Hearing a frustrated customer and responding with your own voice is about as close to the job as eLearning gets. You can try the live demo in your browser, and Sabrina documented the process behind this exact project:
How do you build eLearning like these examples?
Start from the actions people need to take, design decisions with real consequences, storyboard the scenario, then build in the lightest tool that supports the interaction. Here is the compressed version of the process I teach:
Start from actions people must take
List what people need to do on the job, not what they need to know. My scenario-based learning guide walks through this action-first approach in depth.
Design decisions with consequences
For each high-priority action, write the realistic situation, the tempting mistakes, and what happens after each choice. If every wrong answer just triggers "Try again," then go back and find the real consequence.
Storyboard the scenario
Write the dialogue, choices, and programming notes before you open an authoring tool. Here is how to storyboard your scenario without overcomplicating it. Note: you may be able to skip this step if you're using a tool like Claude Design to build prototypes.
Build in the lightest tool that works
A branching scenario might only need Storyline, or even a simple web build. Compare your options in my roundup of eLearning authoring tools.
Test with real people and iterate
Watch someone go through it cold. Where they get confused or bored, the design (not the learner) needs work.
One thing worth knowing about the AI examples above: the conversation layer was the easy part. In our experience, a full project like these takes about 10 hours, and most of that goes into the Storyline design and development. For example: on a live session in 2026, I built a voice-powered simulation, an AI coach, and SCORM reporting to an LMS in about 20 minutes to prove the point. With devlin.ai, you describe the scenario in plain English and get a working voice or text simulation that embeds in Storyline, Rise, or any LMS, with AI evaluation, transcripts, and scores reporting back to the course. The Starter plan runs $9/month, which is how a lot of aspiring IDs build simulations for their portfolios. Describe a conversation your learners need to practice and try the simulation it builds right here:
Where can you find more eLearning examples?
Community showcases and designer portfolios are the richest ongoing sources of eLearning examples. Articulate's E-Learning Heroes weekly challenges generate hundreds of small, focused examples across every interaction type, and individual designer portfolios (like Sabrina's projects linked above) show complete, polished builds with the design decisions explained.
If you are studying examples because you want to build your own, the natural next step is picking one pattern from this list and turning it into a portfolio project. And if you want structure and feedback while you do it, that is exactly what students get at Peck Academy, my licensed career school, where career-transitioners build a scenario-driven flagship project in Storyline 360 with extensive feedback along the way.
Frequently asked questions
What is scenario-based eLearning?
Scenario-based eLearning is a design approach that places the learner inside a realistic story where they make decisions and experience the consequences, rather than reading information and answering quiz questions. The learner typically plays a role (a manager, a driver, a first responder), faces the same tough situations they would on the job, and learns from how the story responds to each choice.
What is the difference between problem-based learning and scenario-based learning?
Problem-based learning gives learners an open-ended problem and asks them to research, discuss, and construct a solution, often collaboratively, with the process largely learner-driven. Scenario-based learning embeds the learner in a pre-designed realistic story where they make decisions at key moments and the narrative responds with consequences. In short: problem-based learning is about working out a solution from scratch, while scenario-based learning is about practicing decisions inside a crafted situation.
What tools were these eLearning examples built with?
The five classics are custom web builds: Shady Sam, The Uber Game, and Payback are browser games built with custom web development, Heart Class is an interactive film produced by UNIT9, and Connect with Haji Kamal was developed by Kinection. The three AI-powered examples pair an authoring layer with devlin.ai for the conversations: Handle with Care and Brushstrokes & Lies use Storyline 360, and Inside the Call was built with devlin.ai voice conversations and SCORM reporting. The comparison table near the top of this article lists the format for each one.