The Problem and The Solution

Problem: 

This eLearning project is inspired by the challenges described in this case study. 

"Financial aid offices within the Departments of Education often administer and regulate student loans and grants to enable students to go to community colleges and universities. They deal with a number of angry customer issues, since often, without financial assistance, many students simply can't afford to continue their educations, and often feel backed into a corner...  staff was not equipped to deal with this new population, that was more volatile, more angry and frustrated, and less capable than the previous clientele."

Solution:

I created an Articulate Rise 360 course for customer-facing employees at financial aid offices that is designed to increase the learner's knowledge of strategies that will improve their confidence during customer interactions, and ultimately create a more positive interaction overall. The course utilizes a variety of different knowledge checks throughout including a pre-assessment of their knowledge, true or false questions, and realistic branching scenarios to help learners effectively retain the knowledge of these strategies to better serve challenging customers. To complete the course,  learners are asked to compose a response to a common customer complaint with at least 3 strategies utilized in their response. This response is compared to a model response, giving the learner options to re-compose or send their response to a manager.

My Process

Guided by the ADDIE model and David Merrill's "First Principles of Instruction", I iterated on each step of my process until I was confident with the learning experience. My process included researching, creating an outline, drafting a text-based storyboard, and gathering feedback from my peers and coaches in the IDOL courses Academy.

You can view the storyboard here. 

Results and Takeaways

Ultimately, this course was designed to reach the following business goal: "Customer complaints will decrease by 30% within the next three months as all customer-facing staff implements new strategies to serve hostile customers better." Data could be collected following staff completion of this course, and measured against the previous month's data before the training. This training could also potentially result in higher morale among the staff,  a lower staff turnover rate, and more positive reviews from customers.

Through completing this project, I learned the importance of designing with a performance goal in mind. So often, in teaching, learning is centered around a sort of "infodump", and I learned through designing and developing this course that just providing information alone does not necessarily change behavior or close a skill or knowledge gap in learners. By utilizing an adapted version of Merrill's Principles of Instruction, I was able to create a task-centered learning solution that solved a business problem.

In addition, I was able to learn the valuable impact of feedback from my peers and coaches in the learning and development communities. For example, one piece of valuable feedback I received was to utilize more real-world images and graphics in the course instead of the more cartoonish ones I had originally selected to match the real-world nature of the scenarios. This detail helped make my course more cohesive overall, and I am grateful for the feedback.

This is one of the first projects I completed for IDOL Courses Academy, and I learned a lot of valuable information about the design and development process, as well as the Articulate Rise 360 authoring tool.

You can view the course by clicking the "start" button, or select this link to open the course in a new tab. 

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