How to design this e-learning course, please help!

Hi KT,

Try looking at this thread first:

http://community.articulate.com/forums/t/41409.aspx

Welcome to E-Learning Heroes, KT!

Sounds like you're just getting started. Have you designed any online training before? 

One thing I'd want you to think about is the type of course you think you need or want to build. We have a showcase of examples featuring different types of online courses:

Studio showcase

Storyline showcase

Tom has some great articles on getting started in e-learning:

Here's a quick overview of the course-building process:

• Basic E-Learning Workflow And Design Process

Couple more resources:

• I'm new to instructional design
• Project kick-off questions - job aid that helps you ask the right questions

What types of source material are you starting with? 

Hi Andy! Welcome to the community! Here are few of things that I found really helpful when getting started: 

I really love David Anderson's visual design mind mapping idea to help you come up with the right look & feel. 

Tom's blog has a ton of great info including: 

• Here Are Ten Rules to Create Engaging Elearning
• Are you building the right type of course

For me the biggest help was jumping in and asking questions and learning from others here. So don't hesitate to ask questions or for ideas and feedback, etc etc. And don't forget to check out the downloads to see if there are things in there that can help give you a head start. 

Best of luck and I look forward to seeing or hearing how it goes! 

Welcome to the community KT. There are some great "get started" resources I see posted here by others. In addition to that I advise taking a look at any internal design standards of the organization, such as use of colors, logo, font, images, etc. Once you have those you can build a template that will help you achieve a consistent design throughout the course. 

I've created a couple of policy courses and the material I was provided was less than intriguing. You might want to consider how to present it in an engaging way, such as:

• Showing examples of what NOT to do to emphasize the undesirable outcomes of not following the policy
• Interviewing an expert and intermixing quiz questions with the interview video
• Presenting the business case studies as a news article from a newspaper or "this just in..." broadcast news

Finally, if you know how the success of the training is going to be measured by the business area (such as by number of new WSH policies created that meet certain criteria) then you might want to spend most of your instructional time on those learning objectives. (Unless they are just measuring course completion, in which case this advice doesn't apply.)

Nicholas, David, Mike and Kimberley - Thank you so much for your professional advice and useful resources.

As a beginner, I'm at a loss of how to start.

Aside to Mike - yes, I am going to jump right in now and ask questions

For this course outline:

• Overview of WSH ACT/ Subsidiary regulations/ Director’s Guidelines

• Introduction to biSAFE concept/ Risk Management concept/ Corporate and Social Responsibilities ( CSR ) of companies 

• Top management responsibilities and the role that they play towards cultivating a good safety culture in the workplace/ Business case studies

• Practical exercises in preparing a WSH policy

For the last point of the course outline, I believe it will be a 'procedure' type of elearning course (correct me if I am wrong)

What about the other 3 points? What type of elearning course would it be?

I'd really appreciate if you can advise me on the type of course for the following:

• WSH ACT
• Subsidiary regulations
• Director's Guidelines
• bizSAFE/ Risk Management concepts
• Social Responsibilities
• Practical exercises in preparing a WSH policy - I believe it's procedure type of elearning course

Thanks for your guidance.

Hi Andy, it sounds like the main objective is learning how to create a good WSH policy? Is that right? The other points seem to be just supporting information for creating the policy? 

Does your organization have a template that is used to create these policy documents? Maybe a walk through of how to fill-in the template would be one approach.  You could show good/bad examples and incorporate the regulations and guidelines in the context of creating a real WSH policy document. 

I'm curious to hear what ideas others have too. 

In a way it is a, "how to do a procedure" type of training. One of the things I find that helps with Health & Safety training is getting people to care about the topic,  the "why is this important to me". Who is your target audience ? In some ways it sounds like your target audience are supervisors and managers, rather than front line workers but typically policy type decisions are completed by senior management. So I'm a little confused on that point. It also might be that I'm not understanding because of differences in jurisdictions and connotations of words.

Show the risks of not following legislation and procedures, such as fines, jail terms, having to tell families that a loved one is injured or dead. Regulations and guidelines are important technical details but you need to get buy in.

Andy,

I agree with others that you must be sure to understand who your audience is and exactly what they need to be able to do as a result of this training.  I would steer away from any 'information dumps' unless you have a strict compliance reason to do so, and then you'll probably want to integrate a graded quiz.

Some of the topics you list, such as 'Subsidiary Regulations', and 'Director Guidelines' sound a lot like information dumps to me. In your eLearning, you might consider relating a very few key points about each of those topics, but then providing the regs/guidelines as separate downloads for learners to take away and refer to later.   Refrain from presenting all the guidelines and regs except in a very high-level way.

Hope this helps and good luck!  

Nicholas, David, Mike and Kimberley - it was decided not to proceed with the above WSH e-learning course.

However, I do greatly appreciate the prompt advice and professionalism of all of you.

My next confirmed task is to design an e-learning course to teach a call centre agent on handling 5 types of difficult customers.

My approach is to have 5 scenarios, each for each type of difficult customer.

Scenario#1:

Andy is a call centre agent for a mobile phone repair company. He took a call, and after using the company's SOP greeting, the customer yelled at him.

Angry Customer: This is Peter. I'm so mad that smoke is coming out from my ears. You were supposed to send me my repaired mobile phone this morning. It's already 5pm! And it takes hours to reach you by phone!

Andy: I'm so sorry, Mr. Peter. I'll check with my dispatcher right away to see what happened. My name is Andy. May I have your Repair Job number, please?

Angry Customer: It's 555-1234. You'd better get someone out to deliver it to me right away. I'm not gonna sit here all day waiting!

Based on the above partial dialogue between the call centre agent and the angry customer, I have the following questions:

1. As there will be dialogue going on between the call centre agent and the difficult customer, what is the best way to show the ongoing dialogue in Storyline?
2. Or should I just write the scenario as a text box and present the choices?
3. Any specific e-learning sample I can refer to?

Or could anyone kindly please advise me what is the best approach for this type of e-learning course?

Thanks a million in anticipation.

Kindest Regards

Hi KT,

Take a look at this site.

www.branchtrack.com

It is an online tool that can be used to create scenarios. It also supports branching. You can create scenarios and insert the published version into articulate storyline as a web object. There are a couple of scenarios examples on the site.

Hope this helps

Vineetha, 

Thanks for your advice.

Branchtrack seemed to be a very good tool for scenarios.

Unfortunately, I need to create my e-learning course using Storyline.

Have you seen this module in the Community Showcase...

http://demos.articulate.com/showcase/broken_co-worker/story.html

If not, you may want to check it out.

Hi Blake,

Thanks a million, Blake.

Yes, I have seen this broken co-worker module.

It is very professionally done, engaging and interesting.

This is my first time using Storyline and attached is my first attempt at creating a scenario.

It is still work in progress. Intention is to create 5 or 6 scenarios.

Hope to have comments and feedback from forum members on my work.

Thanks to all in anticipation.

thank you a lot