The Demonstrate chapter of Real World Instructional Design: An Interactive Approach to Designing Learning Experiences resonates with me. Two projects come to mind as I read this chapter.
Readability Specifications on page 307 (Cename, 2019) reminds me of an important project I worked on a few years ago. Healthcare employees are required to complete an annual curriculum that consists of courses specific to staff and patient well-being. The topic of one of these courses is Compliance.
Compliance training content contains terms and concepts that may be difficult for some people to understand. Because our online annual courses must be completed by all staff regardless of their education level, I was assigned the task of rewriting the course at the eighth grade level.
Though I was able to successfully reduce the number of words in the paragraphs and shorten sentences, it was a challenge to find replacements for much of the legal terminology. This resulted in my adding a glossary to the beginning of the course. The final course ended up with a 10th-grade readability level.
Storyboarding on page 301 (Cename, 2019) provided a fond reminder of a curriculum of courses that I helped design just last year. A physician provided us with a PowerPoint presentation containing over 100 slides. They were in no particular order.
My co-worker initially began to design a course for this content but soon realized that it needed significant restructuring. The file was therefore forwarded to me. I reorganized the slides into topics, but in looking more closely at the information they contained, I realized that a deeper revision was necessary. The primary issue was that it contained more acronyms than words, most of them medical in nature.
At this point, I exported the slides to a Word table to create a preliminary storyboard. Each slide was represented by a thumbnail and next to it, I inserted a note that described edits that were necessary for us to be able to proceed with developing the course. Using these notes as a guide, the SME made revisions to the PowerPoint file. We continued to evolve the storyboard and we progressed through developing the course. We eventually divided it into three ‘chunks’, resulting in a curriculum for which our staff now receives 1.5 Continuing Medical Education credits for completing.
References
Katherine Cename, D. K. (2019). Real World Instructional Design: An Interactive Approach to Designing Learning Experiences. New York: Routledge.