Situation: A school needed to equip 1,400 students with employability skills while maximizing classroom time spent using them.

Task: Create an asynchronous Canvas course that teaches employability skills.  The purpose is to allow classroom instructors to focus on applying these skills in their career field.  The course should include input from local businesses and industry partners and provide 75 minutes of weekly engagement.

Action:  Designed and developed the Skills for Success Canvas course.  Utilized Google Slides as the primary content delivery to allow changes to the content without editing the Canvas course. Produced video resources from community business leaders to embed in the course.  Designed a universal Career Connect Skills for Success template and rubric with multiple stakeholder inputs to give context to student feedback on applying skills.   

Result: Course was embedded and templates utilized by other instructional designers.

Situation: Caring for a lower limb amputation is essential. New amputees need a support network, and a way to learn new skills.

Task: Create an online, on-demand microlearning on limb care that offers insight to new and seasoned amputees. The learning should be personable, and should foster a real sense that there are other amputees who can provide experience and knowledge. 

Action:  Using Articulate Rise 360, a simple learning deck was created using resources from the Amputee Coalition, and publicly available youtube videos coupled with anecdotes from SMARG members and pictures of my own amputation and limb care.

Result: As a pilot learning element, data is being collected on the efficacy of this microlearning. The microlearning will undergo some updates and A/B testing to improve the blocks and will be moved into Articulate Storyline next.

Used with Permission of SMARG

Situation: Hiring 18 new industry professionals over 5 months revealed the need for paced onboarding and unique learning needs. 

Task: Create a system to bring on many new staff(18), all with limited knowledge of the organization, education, and instructional design. The staff arrive in cohorts of 2 to 6 over five months. All staff need to be equipped with organizational knowledge, technology, and instructional tools, and prepare their curriculum. The level of instructional awareness and capacity varied.

Action:  As a part of our systems design, we created a series of intense 1-day workshops with approximately 4-6 weeks between workshops.  We made a spring for each 4-6 week period between seminars.   Each sprint included several well-documented tasks, meetings, processes, and elements to engage in individually or in a small group.  With limited trainer capacity, I created unique open-ended Q&A sessions weekly, focusing on each sprint's primary learning targets.   New cohorts could pace themselves to complete the learning when a new cohort arrived.

Result: More effective onboarding in a short time. Improved grasp of the vision/mission and the "next right thing" in the process. We retained 95% of staff during this period and differentiated individual learning needs.

Situation: An onboarding process for public school staff needed a technology update.  Professional learning for educators is traditionally set aside for specific days of the year.  While this is still the case, specializing in that learning in that time frame can be difficult, especially with newer teachers.  A way was needed to equip teachers with specific instructional skills.

Task: Create an online, on-demand learning environment with rapid access and the ability for a team of authors to create content on a just-in-time model.  Create pathways (multiple learning steps) specific to levels and topics, and a badging (validation) system to identify completion of learning. 

Action:  Reviewed multiple adult learning platforms (Looop, Articulate Rise, Captivate, etc.). Selected Looop (now a part of Learning360) and built a rollout for equipping elementary literacy skills and K-12 onboarding learning into the Looop platform.  Designed and executed training for all central office stakeholders for authoring Looop content (using Looop itself).

Result: Increased onboarding satisfaction ratings. Increased access to learning elements for existing staff while minimizing out-of-classroom or overtime hours. Leveraged some compliance training elements into Looop. 

Situation: Technology tools are necessary for adaptive, creative learning. Presenters/Designers often have more tools than the learners in the workshop. To be successful in supporting educators, it is important to use the tools available to all our educators to engage adult learners.

Task: Create all our multi-modal learning activities for adult learners using the same tools that they would use to work with their students. Ensure that these are available for all educators. 

Action:  Reviewed multiple student learning platforms for multi-modal engagement: Pear Deck, Near Pod, Screencastify, Articulate Rise, Captivate, Canvas, Google Slides, and more. We determined that Pear Deck would provide the best, broadest, most supportive synchronous and asynchronous multi-modal platform.  Developed all our adult content using Pear Deck.  Instructed using two-track (learning and meta-learning) technology platforms

Result: Increased awareness of opportunities for Pear Deck use, maximized familiarity with the tools. Uncovered limitations and best/worst case scenarios for application of the technology and allowed 100% of our learning decks to be multimodal and persist after a workshop. 

Situation: I needed a course that was delivered via e-learning on the Canvas LMS and had practical applications in the workplace. Our business and industry partners contain a wealth of practical situations that would help students apply the learning from the course.

Task: Capture video content from industry partners in a format that engages learners and provides learners with authentic employment.

Action:  To support preproduction, a speaking template was provided to all our participating business partners. Using iPhone cameras, videocasting software (riverside.fm), remote microphone technology, and closed captioning, videos were captured quickly in vertical format. Videos were edited in Camtasia and Riverside.fm tools and hosted on Canvas and Google Drive.

Result: Delivered nine engaging videos with authentic work situations, including Collaboration, Communication, Critical Thinking, Problem Solving, and Personal Management.