Creating eLearning Rockstars
When I returned from two-week vacation, I had an email from my manager in my Outlook Inbox. She was assigning me to a new course. This course was in the pre-development phases with a project team of Subject Matter Experts (who also happened to be Instructors) assigned to the course.
I was also told that they were pretty far into the Design phase, because they had an outline and were starting to figure out their content.
NOT TRUE!
At ATD ICE 2015, I had the experience of having a video go viral and it was intriguing to me.
I did not set out to create a video that got almost 100% viewership and deeply connected with my viewers. It just happened by happy accident.
I had been part of a team that was planning an Instructional Systems Design program for our local ATD chapter and one of my discussions was around the topic “ISD is Dead”.
I love doing stuff like this! It ruffles feathers, gets people defensive, and starts a real conversation about a topic. My true purpose was to discuss how traditional ISD has evolved to meet the various types of media in which we deliver eLearning content.
As this situation played through, it seemed that it was a prime example of what I was trying to describe and intended to use it as a case study.
This video is obviously a piece of informational content, so let’s start there.
As I was sitting in the various discussions of the 2011 Learning Solutions conference, it became clear to me that my career path was in a huge state of flux. I was both excited and scared at the same time. At my office, for quite some time, I was the sole Instructional Designer/Media Developer for my team. I handle the eLearning development of content for two enterprise systems that serve the financial industry. We had other people with the same role as I held throughout other areas of the company, but in our group, I was the only one. In my role, I use at least eight different eLearning skills and roles on a regular basis.
What had me a little concerned about all this change was that it was so interconnected that it wasn’t like you could really just pick up one thing, change that, and be done.
If I wanted to discuss eventually implementing xAPI, I had to bring the discussion of updating our Learning Management System to the table. I had to be able to understand how xAPI worked and it wasn’t documented clean enough for us non-programmer types.
If I wanted to bring video production into our deliverables, I needed to learn motion graphics, new video editing software, purchase the necessary equipment, and have a reliable way to deliver this content to my audience.
If I wanted to discuss implementing mLearning, we needed tablets to test on, we needed a familiarity with HTML5, we needed tools that could publish in that format, and we needed web servers we had ready access to use for testing.
Of course, the overarching concern in all of this was internet/data security. Being part of a financial services company requires a very high level of security. No direct access to WiFi, levels of control as to how large of a file you can put on a web server, and an LMS that affects multiple training and IT groups within the company.
Have you ever been told your eLearning courses were engaging, fun, approachable, or fresh? It finally happened to me and I owe it to the 4-Door design model.
Currently, my primary employer (for about a decade) has been a financial services software company. For them, I almost exclusively create eLearning content using various media to train our clients how to use our software – large, enterprise-systems that run their financial institutions. This is important because it identifies the type of training we do – external clients, software training, for profit, etc.
In the past, similar to most eLearning development teams, we developed very linear courses. These courses may have included some basic branching situations, there may have been basic simulations, but it was all essentially glorified “Next” buttons and a skill check at the end. They start at the beginning and work their way to the end, module by module.
We were ready for a shift because we could sense the change in the industry starting to occur. We had been looking at the concept of “flipping the classroom” as a way to rethink what we were doing. I intend to spend a good deal of time discussing that model in several other posts – this is not that discussion though.
One day, I was looking through some blog posts that I receive through various blog feed tools and I saw one about a new Instructional Design model called the “4-Door” model.