Project 1: AgeGuide Learning Center
AgeGuide’s mission as a company was to be a vital resource and advocate for people as they age by providing thoughtful guidance, supportive services, and meaningful connections. Their vision is to enhance the quality of life for people on their aging journey which includes many facets of help for older adults in the Northeastern Illinois Area. In the process of this beautiful mission statement they wanted to educate the community about how to help out with that exact vision.
This then created the AgeGuide Learning Center. The ALC is an educational resource for everyone in the community. Whether you are a professional in the Aging Services Network, a business, service provider, or an older adult or caregiver. Overall, the courses are designed to better equip you on anything you may need.
The project I was involved with was helping design the Dementia Friendly training courses. These were originally created by their previous Caregiver Specialist. The overall idea was to help pave the way for residents, businesses, and organizations to improve quality of life for people living with dementia and those who care for them. The courses provide best practices to help you build a more inclusive and thriving community.
A.D.D.I.E
After obtaining an online certification in Instructional Design from the University of Illinois Champagne I came in with the knowledge of how to turn this course into something great. I implemented the ADDIE instructional design system to improve an important and complex course to something more user friendly, modern and passionate. Analysis, Design, Development, Implementation and Evaluation all played a huge role in turning this course into a national award winning course.
Analysis:
Understand the gaps that need filling.
As my role as an Instructional Designer on this project they wanted an extensive amount of gaps filled with their previous attempt at the ALC in many different categories. This allowed me to express my background in media production while also fusing it with my new found skills in instructional design to seemlessly give them something new and more efficient.
Gap 1: The Look
The design was stale, out of date and not inviting. The videos felt very mandatory, bland, depressing and monotone. It needed a new aestheic to not only excite businesses and individual learners to take the course, but to help the fight the cause against ageism. After addressing the clients needs and understanding the demographics, I was able to dust away some cobwebs and give them a course that people wanted to take.
Gap 2: The Landing Page
There was no way to get the actual point across to companies and learners that this was a course not only about the disease itself but to also include those with dementia into society instead of shunning them. They needed a landing page that told their story properly and also helped organizations sign up for classes in a smooth seemless way. It neeeded everything within a few clicks and something that made you feel invited.
Gap 3: The Course
After viewing the course it needed a lot of fixes to translate a rather depressng topic to different demographics. The video was too long, too monotone and didn’t emphasize the main point it was trying to get at tone wise. Dementia is a confusing disease that even the experts are still trying to figure out as a whole. It hits every person differently and different measures have to be taken for different personalities. So it had to be more upbeat and engaging to keep the learners from feeling like there is no hope in what they were learning about. Also, repetitive but efficent and resourceful so that you walk away knowing the main points with out too much difficulty.
Gap 4: Talent LMS Management
At the time there was a huge gap between getting these compainies and individual learners to sign up in an efficent way and also to have it personalized for their specific business sector. With something as personal as a topic like dementia, it needed a personal touch to it’s learners needs for taking the course. Minimalizing the steps it took within the survey, the onboarding process and admin privelages helped this run smoothly after it was finalized.
Design:
Based on your analysis, make informed decisions to design the best possible learning experience.
Design Gap 1: The Course
As I read through the script, looked at the slide design, and took the quiz questions to become familiar with the course. I actually had a hard time wondering why this course wasn’t working and not translating well. The information was solid, well worded, and hit the parts that needed more emphasis. The questions helped you remember what the main lesson of the course was and what terms you need to start using moving forward. It was just too slow, monotone, and not engaging with the learner enough to get them to pay attention to the course. It needed a change of tone to create an e-learning environment that people felt excited to be a part of. So, being a voice over actor I took the role of being the teacher in this course and editing the videos. I kept the pace up and read it with enthusiasm which made the course feel more personal. It also needed better audio and video quality than before so it didn’t feel unprofessional and last second, so I made sure to edit it to industry standard consistently.
Design Gap 2: Talent LMS
Orignially AgeGuide wasn’t using a learning platform so classes needed to be migitated over to Talent LMS. AgeGuide didn’t want any major changes to the course material unless it was to fit the new platform. There were plenty of those changes, but we were able to find common ground on all of them and kept their original work with out sacrificing anything. The main gap was organizing Talent LMS to represent what the vision was that AgeGuide had in mind while creating it at the same time. This task wasn’t just for the Dementia Friendly courses but also for the Medicare tutorials that were in 7 different languages. Making sure that each course had the proper thumbnail designed to what the courses overall learning objective was and that the different languages matched the orginal title and video. This was quite the feat being that I only know english and I had no translators on staff except for spanish. On top of that just making sure each course flowed in order and that certifications were sent to the learners at the end of each course. Lastly, since Talent LMS changed their UI to the new beta in the middle of us implementing our course material, there was a lot of making sure the courses translated well into the new system and the user experience was streamlined and worked like any Learning Management System.
Design Gap 3: The Sign Up
AgeGuide needed a time saving way to get the organizations information, their purpose for the course, a way to inform them about the course itself and a way to have all that information sent to my email address to help add their info to Talent LMS. This took quite a few revisions to get it right because we realized it was a way to keep statistics of what kind of companies we onboard for our annual reports. Wireframing the entire survey was crutial to not only making sure each path led them down the path that suited thier needs the most but gave us the right information to help us help them in the onboarding process. Overall, we were able to connect all of these different needs and code it to send to my email.
Development:
Bring your learning experience to life by building your end product.
Thumbnails:
I decided to start with rebranding the way the course was being portrayed and asked them a lot of questions of who they wanted to take the course. Asking this question first was very helpful in my approach to not only designing the visuals for the course but also designing the course itself. The answer was…Everyone! This topic was not just for a certain demographic, it was for people who worked in a specific business sector. It needed to touch every part of a community to ensure that people with dementia were treated with respect. I decided to give it a modern look with bright colors and a more inclusive design that was more about the people taking the course vs. who it was about. Dementia is a depressing disease that has no cure, but that is not something anyone wants to be reminded of. AgeGuide wanted the learners to understand the disease in a general way and they wanted to answer their question “How do I make this person comfortable, included and happy?”. That’s why a positive spin was needed on this course, to show that there is a way to do this.
The Landing Page:
The next gap was not just a gap but something that needed implementation from the start. Orignially this part was done by our communications specialist but she was out on maternity leave and someone needed to help market the course. I stepped up to the role and worked with the IT department to create a landing page that really got businesses excited to take the course, but also something that didn’t look like the aesthetic of the rest of the website to make it special. As a Area Agency on Aging they were known and expected to have a “government” like website with lots of detail and pages of text to make sure they covered every minute detail legally. This was something I didn’t want any of these learners to experience before they got into the course. I ensured that each explaination was under a certain amout of characters and was punctual enough where the reader understood everything there was to know about the courses. This created a landing page that kept everything within a few clicks and sold these organizations on the course to enroll.
Implementation:
Distribute your learning product to your audience.
After releasing the ALC we were reconized for a national award for creating a platform where individuals and organizations can learn and get certified in being Dementia Friendly. It was very well recieved and the learners felt engaged, heard and walked away with a better knowledge of the disease. To AgeGuide this achieved their mission statement to better the community. Even with this great feedback we had 2 major issues arise and we attended to them in ways that made this course run even tighter.
Issue 1: Onboarding Organizations
On top of my role of designing the course I also had to be an administrator to all of the organizations and individual learners who wanted to use the ALC. I had to learn how to use Talent LMS from the IT department to be certified to administrate and onboard the different organizations as well as keeping tabs on all of them for weekly reports. Originally there was an excrutiatingly long process to make this happen from an admnistrators perspective and a lot of the organizatons had trouble following the instructions. Sometimes the Talent LMS email would go right to their spam folder or the learners wouldn’t be able to identify that the email was even about the AgeGuide Learning Center. This took exenstive beta testing with some non bias employees to create an efficient and fool proof onboarding email that would skip all of those steps.
Issue 2: Individual Learners
AgeGuide realized an issue after making everything availiable to the public that needed a quick and seemless change. The issue is that it was too much work to onboard individual learners to the ALC and that we did not have enough room for people to be on that platform due to our subscription price. It was also too many steps for the learner to go through and that they needed a few clicks to access the information instead of like an organization that would need a bigger process to onboard more individuals which was more natural.
Evaluation:
Evaluate your learning end product.
Onboarding Organizations After Evaluation:
Just like Dementia itself, the way you care for someone couldn’t be generalized and done one way, you had to take each businesses wants and needs in to consideration and work with them to make that possible. This then created a more personalized email instead of an auto-email, a quick tutorial video to logging in as an admin and an equally as detailed step by step guide to logging in and a well as a drafted email for their employees/learners to recieve from the organizations administrator so they don’t have to do it themselves. Lastly, adding a way to contact us and book a meeting just incase they wanted to use their IT Department to flasgship the onboarding process or a zoom call with plenty of time to ask questions about how to work with Talent LMS.
Individual Learners After Evaluation:
We decided that Talent LMS was going to only be for the organizations and not individual learners once we finished the ALC because it was too much management making sure one individual was certified or made it through the course. Through our subscription to Talent LMS we were only able to obtain 1000 users at a time and it could get crowded really quick if the individuals were in the system as well as a larger organization. We decided that no individual learners would use Talent LMS. We realized it would be great traffic to not only our website but our YouTube channel to have the individuals watch the courses there instead and create a landing page just for individual learners so it eliminated any confusion.