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.