Overview
This project is an eLearning course aimed at employees of a property management company. The goal of this training is to ensure that all property managers are able to conduct the applicant screening process successfully.
Audience: Newly appointed property managers will be required to complete this training when they are hired.
Responsibilities: Instructional Design, eLearning Development.
Tools Used: Articulate Storyline 360, WellSaid Labs.
Problem
The fictional company that I developed this project for had seen a higher than normal property turnover rate related to cases of tenants who could not continue to pay rent or who violated the terms of the lease at the property. After a review of the factors leading to this situation, it appeared that the main issue had to do with a lack of rigor in how the newer staff screened applicants. The company admitted that the training in place was minimal due to time constraints and a lack of available people who could be available to train new employees as they were onboarded.
Solution
I proposed an eLearning course as the best choice for this situation because it would allow for all new employees to complete the training at their own pace when they are hired instead of having to wait for a time when the training can be facilitated. This would also give flexibility to the employer, it would reduce the amount of resources that needed to be used to train each single employee, and it would ensure that the training is always available right when it is needed.
In terms of the learner experience, an eLearning course would allow the learner to think about the applicant screening process using real-life scenarios, being able to apply what they are learning and with the option of going back to review content before moving on to ensure that they really know the content. The learner would interact with the content, make decisions the same way they would in real situations, and receive feedback on the results, which would result in real-life application learning.
Process
1. Design Document
The design document was the first step in determining what the course was meant to achieve, what the learning objectives were, and what the structure of the course would be.
Click here to download the full document
2. Text-based Storyboard
After the design document was finished, I created a storyboard that expanded on the ideas from the design document by giving a slide-by-slide description that included the exact text content, animations, and audio text that would be included in the course.
Click here to download the full document
3. Visual Storyboard
Once the overall design concept and the text storyboard were satisfactory, I jumped into creating each slide on Storyline following the text-based storyboard that I had developed, which showed step by step what the final result would look like. This phase did not include any interactions or layers.
4. Interactive Prototype
In the next phase, the visual storyboard on Storyline was transformed into a first version or prototype of the project. This prototype included every interaction that was described in the storyboard so that a test audience could try the product and give feedback on it. It also included audio, which was produced with the text-to-speech feature on Storyline.
5. Full Development
After feedback on the interactive prototype, I moved on to the final stage of development, in which I fixed bugs that my audience had caught, added more instructions for certain exercises, and made small changes to design based on feedback. I also modified the audio following audience feedback and produced its final version on WellSaid Labs, which has better quality than the Storyline-produced audio files that I had included in the prototype.