How the team at Endurance Learning turned a highly technical training topic into an engaging learning experience.
Many people walk through airports daily, not thinking about the many factors that contribute to a safe and successful experience. One of those factors is airport lighting. Airport lighting systems are all around us, guiding pilots, alerting ground vehicles, marking hazards, but to most people (even those who work at or around airports), they remain invisible in meaning, function, and importance.
When our team was asked to develop an elearning module to bring this topic to life, we knew that we needed to break down this content in a memorable and logical way.
The Challenge: Shedding Light on Technical Content
The learning objectives for the module were clear:
- Explain the purpose of airport lighting
- Describe the requirements for lighting obstacles
- Provide an overview of the Visual Approach Slope Indicator Systems (VASIS)
- Clarify lighting requirements for different areas of the airport
- Outline traffic directives for airside vehicles
While the objectives made sense on paper, the content behind them was deeply technical, dense with regulations, acronyms, and systems that could easily blur into each other. To make this meaningful to our audience, we needed a strategy that didn’t just present the information, but helped learners see it, experience it, and apply it.
The Design Solution: Visualize, Interact, and Experience Technical Training Content
We used several approaches to bring clarity to this topic:
1. Real-World Images: Lighting in Context
We integrated high-resolution, real-world images of airport environments like runways at dusk, service vehicles near taxiways, and control towers bathed in low light to ground the learning. These images not only provided context for the content, but illuminated the vast variety of situations in which airport lighting is relevant and important.
We know from adult learning theory that learners need an anchor to connect the content to their personal experience. Vivid, realistic imagery immediately connects the learners to the very real work they do.
2. Custom Graphics: Deconstructing Complexity
To explain systems like obstacle lighting and approach indicators, we used custom-drawn diagrams. These helped strip away background noise and highlight the why behind each lighting choice. By breaking down the anatomy of runway lighting or lighting systems for obstructions, we made the system feel less like a regulation and more like a logic puzzle that learners could solve.
Visuals aren’t a bonus; they’re a translation tool for technical training content.
Delivering content is where it is easy to get tripped up. Whether built in Storyline, Rise, or in a PowerPoint deck, it is tempting to share all of the information on screen that learners “need to know.” Explanatory, interactive visuals helped us deliver content in a way that helped the learner build knowledge instead of using the screen as a content delivery system.
3. Interactive Pilot View: Slope Lights in Action
One of the interactive features was demonstrating lighting systems in a pilot view simulator. Learners could “fly” toward a virtual runway, changing the slope of the plane, and watching slope lights change based on their angle of approach. Suddenly, systems like “VASI” or “AVASI” gained more meaning and were something learners could feel in real time, like a pilot would.
Interactivity isn’t just engagement, but a way to test understanding through doing.
The reason that flight simulators are so critical to pilot training is that you have to experience it to internalize it. We weren’t training pilots to make life or death decisions, but it didn’t mean that we couldn’t simulate the experience to make sure that learners understood the message.
It doesn’t matter what the context is, we push ourselves as designers to give the learners the opportunity to apply what they’ve learned.
Making Meaning from Technical Training
Lighting may not seem like the most thrilling topic, but when we dug into it, we saw it more about safety, guidance, and human factors in high-stakes environments. Our goal wasn’t just to teach airport lighting; it was to help learners feel why it matters.
In all three situations shown here, our goal was to apply adult learning theory to the technical training topic and recognize that content delivery wasn’t the issue, engagement and retention was.
In Summary
Our work at Endurance Learning brings us this type of challenge every day, but it isn’t always in the obvious situations like airport lighting. Even when we’re working with fun and exciting clients like Pet Partners, an organization that helps people work with therapy animals to bring comfort and joy, there will be technical training content like regulations. Our job is to make sure that the experience helps the learner walk more capable and confident as a result of the training we design.
In the end, this module helped learners walk away with not just knowledge, but confidence and the ability to interpret and respond to lighting cues that could impact safety, efficiency, and lives.
