Instructional Design
I became involved and interested in instructional design within my first two years as a technical writer. Self-taught, I started learning the software available to me that could craft and edit interactive e-learning modules, which was Adobe Captivate at the time. For years, I was the sole creator of these lessons and manager of the company’s learning management system (LMS). Eventually, when our team grew and I was allowed more bandwidth, we were able to expand our learning development horizons with an improved LMS and new e-learning tools.
Early Work
With little experience in instructional design and no coworkers to really teach me the details, I dug into the process on my own. I investigated various courses online that could give me the basics. I spent days upon days learning the functionality and capabilities of Adobe Captivate. I attempted different approaches to creating learning modules that would be engaging and approachable to an average user.
My early attempts were extremely valuable for understanding the different approaches I could take at crafting interactive courseware. I received valuable feedback about volume levels, course length, detail, how to present material, limitations of our platform, and where it was possible to improve
Supervisor | Email Review Course
I drafted a script based on material that was in our documentation. I then recorded my voice in Audacity so I had more control over the sound quality. I then used Techsmith SnagIt to collect screenshots of the interface and assemble images for the title cards. Finally, I added all the material into Adobe Captivate to assemble and publish.
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Flex | Rearranging Panes Course
Since I was the sole creator of e-learning Content for multiple years, and there was a demand to expand our learning platform’s library of courses quickly in time for a specific release of the product, I had to use a different method than what I did for courses like Supervisor | Email Review Course. I developed some Captivate course templates and a process that would produce bite-sized courses in a fraction of the time it could take to build a full course. This is an example of a course using that process.
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A New Approach
When I was given a team of tech writers and learning experience designers, I finally had the bandwidth and the necessary experience to accomplish some overdue improvements that were needed for our training platform and process.
Click the buttons to see more details about each project
eGain University
eGain University is the name of the Learning Management System (LMS) we used to deliver our training material. The service provider is Docebo.
When I became the administrator of eGain University, there were only a handful of courses on the platform, and it was operating with its original design, with the settings that had been configured by the previous administrator. With the expansion of our team, I was able to work with a talented designer to reorganize the pages and structure of the platform to be more intuitive and aesthetically pleasing. We had some restrictions that prevented us from achieving everything we wanted, but it also forced us to come up with some creative solutions.
Knowledge Academy
The Knowledge Academy was a special request by superiors to take material from our in-house subject-matter experts of knowledge management and AI, and create a certification program for both internal and external users. It went through multiple iterations as we progressed, and we eventually released a learning path from it on the public learning platform, Coursera.
Global Onboarding
For years, my previous employer had offices in different regions of the world. As the company grew, so did the demand for training material that users could access in the US West Coast, US East Coast, EMEA, and India regions. The events of 2020 made the demand for remotely accessible training more important than ever. I created the first version of our global onboarding material with limited resources. However, I was able to collaborate with new team members and improve it greatly.
AI Masterclass
The AI Masterclass was a recent collaborative project that our team delivered on an extremely short timeline. Using material from subject-matter experts, presentations from recent sales events, and extensive material for interactive labs, five of us created a new, internal certification program to teach users how to use AI effectively with some important best practices and concepts.
Knowledge & AI Learning Center
The Learning Center is one of the last projects I worked on at eGain as part of the release of a new version of the product. It is an experiment of combining our documentation methods and software with e-learning to make a more informative and engaging experience than typical help files.
Let’s Connect
I’m here to help and offer my expertise as a technical writer and instructional designer. If you need assistance with your documentation or learning management system, please feel free to reach out.