9. Context and Challenge Challenge Call to action that builds on the context. & Context The learner’s role and other situational details.
10. Context You are an ambitious firefighter who aspires to someday be a fire marshal. In addition to your usual duties, your fire captain has recently asked you to take on the added responsibility of overseeing fire door inspection.
11. Challenge Over the next week, you need to perform fire door inspections at three locations: an office building, a school, and a hospital. Your diligence will help determine how safe these buildings are in the case of a fire, so be thorough!
12. Activity and Feedback Activity Meaningful interactions that simulate real world actions and thought processes. Feedback What happens as a result of the learner’s choices. &
13. Activity & Feedback 1- Office Building (Guided Level) 2 - School 3- Hospital Three course “levels.” For each level, the learners will: Identify the fire doors in the building (Activity 1) Inspect the fire doors and complete the inspection form (Activity 2) See the potential impact of their work (Feedback)
My proposed solution has two parts. Performance aid that can be used in the field. Any time there is a complex procedure that requires attention to detail, I think performance aid. Even if eventually inspectors wean themselves off of it, it’s useful to get over the initial learning curve. I also like to, whenever possible, use this SAME performance aid in any initial training, online or off. In this case, it would be used during the online course. This should be an LMS-based course that let’s users practice inspecting the fire doors in buildings in a simulated environment. Essentially, I want to give the users a safe place to practice and test their understanding of the regulations. It’ll also give them a chance to try out the performance aid, making it more likely that they’ll use it in the field as well.
As part of the existing course materials, there is a resource that is kind of like a performance aid - two page list of steps for performing visual inspections. This is good, but I I think it could be made even more useful! I’d like to give the user option to access this information either on a smart phone, using HTML that is specifically formatted for a mobile browser. They’d also be able to access this same information using hard copy checklist to carry on a clipboard. For both versions, I’d like this to be more of a real checklist, where at every step the user physically checks (or clicks) to acknowledge that they’ve completed the step. This will help cut down on skimming - right now it’s more like bullet points. With SME help, I also think that this information could be condensed - for example, everything that involves “inspecting” might be in a quicker checklist where you just check off the name of the item as you inspect it.
For the HTML version of the performance aid, in addition to checklists, I think it would be useful to have images available for common inspection trouble areas. Useful in leveling the field between more and less experienced inspectors. Photos AND diagrams of common issue areas. Client has lots of photos already - our 2D artist can trace into diagrams.
When I’m designing online courses, I like to start with Michael Allen’s instructional design framework: Context, Challenge, Activity, Feedback. I’m going to step through my proposed course structure using this as a framework. I’ll talk more about each along the way.
The context describes the circumstances or facts that surround a particular situation. I lean toward realistic contexts, because I think it’s the best way to promote learning transfer, but I also think there is wiggle room within realism to add more tension and engagement than might be in a typical situation. In my designs, context and challenge often end up pretty closely interwoven. Essentially, challenge is a call to action based on the given context that will lead to the activity for the course.
For this particular course, my suggestion for context: You are an ambitious firefighter who aspires to someday be a fire marshal. Your fire captain has asked you to take on the added responsibility of overseeing fire door inspection. Reasons behind my decisions: Specificity Ambition/Risk
Challenge: Over the next week, you need to perform fire door inspections at three locations: an office building, a school, and a hospital. Your diligence will help determine how safe these buildings are in the case of a fire, so be thorough! Reason behind my decisions: Types of building - client feedback plus elements of risk - lots of people impacted - schools older, retrofitting Even though ultimate responsibility to fix lies with building owner, we want the inspector to feel emotional responsibility to encourage a thorough inspection
Activity Meaningful interactions that simulate real world actions and thought processes. I want to user to be practicing the same sorts of skills they need in the real world. Feedback What happens as a result of the learner’s choices. Not correct/incorrect. Emotionally compelling, real-world impact of good and poor decisions.
On slide stuff Guided Level Mentor walk through first few door inspections Mentor offer additional information from the source materials - helpful inspection tips, top ten deficiencies in fire doors, acceptable/unacceptable field modifications, information on the door labels, etc. More compelling and useful in context rather than just as introductory material.
I’d open the course by having the fire captain (mentor figure) introduce the course in the fire station break room through a series of brief, to the point speech bubbles. This is just one screen of several that would form this part of the introduction Would include: Context - User Role and Situational Details Information about applicable that appears in the original source slides. The remainder of the information from those slides is going to end up as part of the user activities within the course.
Here, also as part of the introduction, the mentor introduces the challenge of inspecting the three buildings.
Here is a graphic that could be used as the basis for the first activity, which is to IDENTIFY all of the fire doors in the building. For the final version, our internal artists would make a building that has a wider variety of door types, so that we can be sure to address a variety of potential problems. In real life, sometimes inspectors will be able to access floor plans of the building that will identify all of the fire doors in the building - other times, this will not be available, so the inspector will need to look for door labels to identify fire doors. The goal of this activity is to for the user to be able to identify fire doors in those times when they DON’T have the floor plan. Users click each floor of the building for a closer view. Then, within each level, they can click each door to look for labels and either mark it as a fire door or not a fire door.
Activity 2: Inspect the fire doors in the building and complete the inspection form . This is just a wireframe that would definitely look prettier once the artists got done with it. The goal of this activity is to mimic the real life activities and thought processes that the user will need to complete during an inspection. On the left, the users can interact with the door to zoom in, zoom out, open and close doors, and switch which side of the door that they are viewing. Goal is to make this like interacting with a real life door. They have the option to view the mobile version performance aid on the screen, or they can print out a copy of the checklist for use while completing their inspections. As they inspect, they will fill out the same sort of forms they would on a clipboard in real life, with modifications to work within an eLearning applications. This is definitely the most complicated of the user interactions, and I don’t want to overwhelm some of our less tech savvy users. The first few inspections would be essentially guided walkthroughs, where the user is told where on the interface to click to change the views and fill out the form. Later, if they need help, they can select a button for more information about the interface.
In the guided level in the office building, the mentor will offer feedback as the user works through the level. In the second two levels, the mentor will come in ONLY at the end of the level, after the inspections are complete, and essentially ask, “What might happen if this building caught on fire?” If inspection reports were not thorough, the building owners might not have made all of the necessary repairs. This means, that if the building caught on fire, parts might burn down. Went for worst case scenario, emotional feedback with a newspaper article “40 dead after hospital fire!” Then the mentor would walk to user through the specific issues that were missed. User could try again.
