A Continued phase of Design

With various documents in hand with what needs to occur in the final product of what new Team Members must learn throughout their first 20 days, I have been diligently working on a design document of what each day should look like. I have broken that Design Document down into 5 color categories with sectors of work that NTM must be familiar with as well as added times and learning progressions throughout the design document, I have now gotten through 6 days of solid work and a portion of a few more days there after. I have multiple meetings with business patterns who are experts at New Team Member training and what must occur and they have really enjoyed looking through the beginning stages of the design document and believe that it has great potential. I have made sure to add in segments of instruction that are from senior staff members, management, online training courses and hands on follow shifts that should benefit the new Team Member accordingly. Additionally, since this is more of a side project that I work on, I took existing battery knowledge assessment courses that we have been working on for current Team Members and have been formatting them to be a part of NTM on boarding. They will be required to take these tests before the first week is over so that we can build out their learning plan accordingly.

Below is an example of one of the pages from the Design Document that I have been working on. It is a very lengthy document, totalling 32 pages and rouhgly half way complete. This shows learning progressions, learning success acheivements, and day break down.

Beginning a New Project

At work recently, I was tasked with working on the new hire, first 20 day learners guide. This will consist of a copy for General Managers to have to help them facilitate and train the new hires, what to do with them in terms of activities and hands-on learning as well as answers to quizzes. The second copy will be information broken down into days as well as learning checkpoints for the new Team Members to keep and learn from.

After a couple of meetings, we decided we will create a test market first and set up training stores in regions for all new hires to go to to see how the use of proper training procedures work.

Being in the beginning phases we have done the Analysis and know that we need to critique our new hire training program, however, analysis still needs to be done on what all needs to be covered. We have multiple past General Managers who now work as corporate trainers and go to new store openings to train new hires, however there still may be some shortfall in that bleeding into stores that are set in their ways and have been open for many years. As part of the Analysis phase, I am beginning to work in an Advance Auto Parts store part-time. They do not know that I am from corporate as I applied as a walk in. This is not in means to cause anything to the store if they do a poor job, but more just to go in and see what I am taught, and shortfalls and find out thing I wish I would have known earlier or later in the process to get a better and more accurate understanding of what needs to be taught to the new hires.

How ADDIE can solve problems

This week was interesting for me in my internship. The week before I had finished a course before leaving down to which I thought was complete and it turns out, it was not. I spent this current week trying everyday to solve the problems, edit the course and make sure that it works correctly and loads in our stores. The biggest issue with training for our team as Instructional Designers and Video Producers is the amount of bandwidth that goes to stores. Due to this, we are limited to what we can implement as many of times, if a store is busy, courses on our training laptops placed in each of our 3,000+ stores will run slower.

My course on car care chemicals was no different. Before, we published courses with video sizes of 140x320 pixels and now we are bumped up our size to 360x640 to increase viewer experience. However, with larger videos comes more loading.

One might ask, where does ADDIE come in?

Well...

This course still did not work after 3 days of attempted fixes so I changed my approach. I stepped back an analyzed three other courses that had the larger video formats in them. went into the LMS system to watch the rate of which the courses load and eventually came to the conclusion that because I received .FLV instead of .SWF files, they were downloading completely instead of instant playback while buffering, which is what our bandwidth is modified for.

Furthermore, I found that because I was not using a master slide and had images on each page that had to load, it was causing the course to load slower, and therefore had to go into the design phase and create master slides with the image used in order for it to load once and not every time a new page appeared in the course.

We then found out that the course was sized to large to begin with and had to be scaled down. Therefore I had to redevelop the course to fit the information sections along with the videos.

I then implemented all the changes and retested the course. It finally worked and loaded much faster than the beginning versions. It still has some lag time and we believe that because our courses with video usually have 1-3 small clips and mine has 7 substantial clips it is to be expected. We also found out that my courses file size went from 157,986 KB down to 31,748 KB once all the changes had been made.

Finally, we employed a survey at the end of the course for employees to click on to evaluate how the videos loaded to see how we can fix the issue in the future.

So, here is a great example of how we always think of ADDIE to design effective training programs, but in this case it solved a problem.