Learning Developer. Over the past two decades of developing leaning materials both online and for the classroom, I've see that people learn best if their educational experience closely resembles the environment they're going to be working in.

To do this, I model the working/production environment with as much fidelity (realism) as possible. Then design, produce and deploy scenario/context based software worlds in which people can "see" themselves in the job encountering problems that need to be solved in order to do a good job. This is done mostly with animated sequences, glued together with assessments (questions) and feedback.

I include "in-line" assessments and immediate feedback, so people can know right away if they are "doing it right." I prefer to combine formative and summative assessment into the learning experience, rather than give a summative exam at the end. If the assessments are reliable and valid, there is no reason to produce a separate exam. Learning assurance is achieved through the reliability of the questions. (Sorry for the ID lingo, but I'm assuming most of this audience will be somewhat familiar with this stuff).

Best,
Doug