Revision Work

These past few months I’ve been doing a lot of revision work. Course revisions are never as interesting as building a course from scratch so I don’t have much to report. But there is an upside, because the revision projects are short, I’ve been able to work on quite a few and use the latest versions of Articulate, Lectora, and Captivate. I’m now up-to-date with all three major authoring tools: Articulate 09, Lectora x, and Captivate 5, woo hoo!

Training to support launch of 3rd party Onboarding Portal

The Onboarding Portal is an online tool that manages many aspects of the onboarding process. This includes managed forms, tasks, socialization, and analytics. This tool allows the company to attain the goals of improving new hire engagement and retention and simplifying and standardizing the process for onboarding new hires and leveraging technology for the delivery and management of those processes. This portal is a major system that impacts all new hires, the hiring managers, recruiters, and anyone else that is involved in the onboarding process.

This project was both interesting and challenging in that it is a brand new, complex system that involved the collaboration of the human resources, IT, and the training department to configure, install, deploy and provide training to users successfully.

Role: Acting project lead and instructional designer

• Conduct training analysis and design.
• Manage training project schedule.
• Design course layout and initial graphics groundwork for contractor to follow to maintain consistency throughout all courses.
• Manage and review contractor work
• Work closely with the customer to ensure that the newest changes and updates are reflected in the training.
• Support implantation of the training rollout, ensuring that instructors are trained and materials are reproduced and delivered to the classroom.

Project Challenges/Issues & Solutions

Challenge: The schedule for system installation and configuration runs parallel with  training development with training starting 3 weeks before the full system go-live.

Solution: Participate in all project core team meetings to ensure that our needs for resources are met and that any changes or updates to the systems are immediately known and reflected in the training materials.

Challenge: Our analysis identified five distinct audiences to be impacted by the system.

Solution: Create five courses that share the same overview lessons but tailored to the needs of each audience. Sharing the same layout and media assets, the rest of the lessons in each course contain distinct content customized to the roles of each audience.

Challenge: One audience has approximately 1500 members located in various parts of the United States that are to be trained immediately, there is an additional group numbering in the thousands that will need the training in the months following system go-live.

Solution: Training solution includes daily instructor led online courses for multiple weeks and a WBT course that can be delivered anytime to any location via the company intranet.

Challenge: Implementing the system will mean moving users from a mostly manual and paper process to a highly electronic, automated, online process.

Solution: Training design made sure to make heavy use of  system demonstrations to show audience as much as possible, the system in action.

Issue: System demonstrations is extremely difficult and tedious to set up as there are a number of artificial data that needs to be created to walk a fictional new hire through an entire onboarding experience from start to finish.

Solution: All the system demos are recorded so that every session consistently show the same demonstration.

Systems Engineering Series WBT

As a provider of scientific, engineering, systems integration and technical services solutions, systems engineering is a core discipline practiced across the company. Most projects involve the close collaboration of systems engineers and non-systems engineers. Because of the complexity of the engineering field, team members that are not systems engineers sometimes are not aware of how their role interacts or intertwines with systems engineering. To address this, the customer wanted a WBT course that introduces non-systems engineers to the systems engineering discipline.

This was an interesting and difficult project. We had little material to start with and basically started from scratch. Our SMEs are longtime experts in the field, having 15-30 years of experience, their world is systems engineering. Getting from them that perfect amount of information that will educate a non engineer and at the same time not put them to sleep or overload them with information was a delicate balancing act. At some point, I felt I could almost be a systems engineer myself. “Almost” This was a project where I was able to see the power of the ADDIE model (analysis, design, development, implementation, evaluation).

Role: Instructional Designer

• Develop high quality, creative WBT courses to meet customer needs and expectations.
• Met with customer to address client needs and ensure customer satisfaction.
• Demonstrate technology capability to broaden customer understanding encourage acceptance.
• Provide various solutions and alternatives to address issues and potential problems with initial training plan as scope of project and customer needs changes.
• Provide and assist customer with long-term implementation process and coordination of duplication and distribution of training materials.

Project Challenges/Issues & Solution

Challenge: Main question, “What to teach, and how much?”

Solution: After careful analysis we decided upon six hourlong WBT modules that covered the major aspects of systems engineering. Each module is standalone and could be taken individually and separately, out of sequence if desired.

Challenge: SMEs are experts that know almost ‘too much’ about everything .

Solution: Using a detailed outline that we developed early in design, worked very closely with SMEs to make sure we are focused and in scope. Subjected drafts to vigorous reviews by peers.

Challenge: With various technology available to use, what is the right combination?

Solution: No two projects are the same, careful analysis of our customer’s needs, our audience and the subject matter allowed us to select the correct combination of tools to use for this project.

Lectora Tips n Tricks

Some tips and tricks compiled over time.

• Size captivate files for the Lectora workspace before importing. If it is too small or too big, resizing may distort your captivate movie.
• Turning on guides will show it for the entire project, but will not print. If you use Snap to Guide under View, the upper left corner of your text box/image will ‘snap’ to your guides.
• If you link to a page in a section, but later move it (by dragging the page on the left column) to another section, the link will update itself.
• The eyeball hides items from developer view only in Lectora, but will still publish.
• Tests only allow your student to answer a question once, you would have to program it yourself for that feature  feature meaning multiple tries on an answer.
• Before publishing a final copy, delete any previously published materials and start fresh.  Lectora publishes over the previous publications, overwriting the same file names, but if you changed the page/section/chapter names (essentially creating a new file name), the old files will not be deleted. Since it’s HTML, the folder is big, but items are called up from the server only as needed.
• SAVE often (this applies to any software)! and backup a copy Every Day. A bad crash can lose all information. If you are doing a whole ton of work, it may be wise to make a full backup partway through. It’s really not that common, but it is very frustrating when it does.
• What you see may not be what you get when published. Applies mostly to text boxes. Occasionally, text placement can shift when it is viewed in a browser, it may misalign with icons and other graphics. One trick is to put the icons in the text box and not outside the text box.

IDE Training Development

An Integrated Digital Environment (IDE) is an environment of integrated softwares that together support program management, project control, systems engineering, configuration management, risk management, and knowledge management. This environment allows instantaneous sharing of resources across various functions so that large and complex programs can be efficiently managed.

Working independently, I supported the project team to provide training/help system support for the implementation of an enterprise IDE. One of the largest programs I’ve been on with a lot of room for innovation and creative designs, this was a very fun project for me. I enjoyed using a combination of training methods to address the various training needs for this program.

Role: Instructional designer acting project lead

• Work closely with IT and the project management team to analyze training/documentation requirements, design training solutions, and develop training and documentation materials. 
• Design and develop self-paced instruction(jobaids), self-help systems, and highly interactive WBTs, classroom instruction and related documentation.
• Consult with the project team to observe vendor training and review vendor training materials and make recommendations for updates to vendor products.
• Communicate effectively with the project team, manage customer expectations, and provide status reporting.
• Manage project tasks to meet technical and schedule requirements.