design help (again!)

Sep 03, 2014

It seems like I always turn to this forum when I am stuck.

I am being asked to design a course to teach people how to complete a patient assessment form.  The focus is really on the form and not the assessment.  It takes about 2.5 hours in the classroom to do this. Right now, you sit in a room and watch someone walk through the form. Boring! And confusing because they go through every possible scenario.

I'm not sure how to attack this.  I'm thinking about creating a patient and having them walk though the form for the patient.  Maybe click on a patient icon at each section of the form to ask the patient questions to get the info needed for that part of the form.  But, this approach seems like it will take 1. a long time to design and 2. a long time to sit through.

I thought about breaking it up into sections, but there are 10 sections to the form! I don't want people to get turned off by the thought of having to complete 10 modules, even if they are short.

The audience consists of new hire nurse practitioners and physician assistants. Various levels of experience. New to this type of health care. Spread out across the country.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

6 Replies
Holly Eva

I would probably commit the large amount of time to developing one module per type of patient and create a branched scenario where they learn how to complete the form correctly for each type of patient. I don't know how many different types of patients they cover within the F2F course you describe above, but it's a thought.

Adele Sommers

Building on what Holly suggested, another way to tackle this might be to find out which patient types comprise the most frequent and complex uses of the form — those truly worthy of the time and expense to develop e-learning. By using the 80:20 rule or a general approximation (where, say, 20% of the patients involve 80% of the complexity and criticality), you could potentially pare down the universe to a smaller number of scenarios.

The remaining scenarios could possibly be handled via basic job aids — cleverly designed lookup tables or simple PDF files. If this idea resonates with the stakeholders, it could shorten the e-learning development time by focusing it on what really matters most.

Wishing you the very best of luck with this project!

Adele

khoi arvin

Hi Alex

Holly and Adele have great suggestions. You could make this into smaller modules and focus on the 20% patients. Consider my post as complementary to their idea.

I don't have as many projects under my belt as many posters here but maybe I can offer some ideas. It sounds like you have a form that needs to be completed correctly with many variables.

Here is how I would tackle your challenge:

Determine what actions you want the learners to successfully repeat. Is it the form that is a challenge or the questions they need to ask the patients to successfully complete the form?

I could by wrong here but my guess is the challenge is the patient query aspect. How can you make sure they ask the right questions? How many variables are involved?

If we proceed along the assumption that the questions are the important part, perhaps the form fields can be a simple job-aid or quick reference guide. That leaves you time and effort into creating a meaningful immersion with hands on.

Take your learner and put them in their work environment.

Give them several different patients and make your learners do their job in several scenarios.

Let them use the job-aid as a tool to complete the form but focus on the most likely failure points with questions they need to ask and branching of the results.

Allow them to be wrong in a safe environment but supply real-time and meaningful feedback as they progress.

Good luck on your project.

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