Immerse Yourself

Progress

We are making a lot of progress with our training system, but have been discovering that it is difficult it is to design without access to the target audience for evaluative purposes. Happily, we've received 11 responses to the evaluation survey--five more than last semester. I have been working on the End of Shift Duties training module, and have been learning to compromise. I have so many fun, interactive ideas for it and the tools to implement them, but not all would be easy to make Section 508 compliant in the short amount of time we have left to polish off the training system. I pictured an graphic rich image based interactive "click and respond" type module, but the general layout has to look like the other modules...and I'm not sure exactly how to implement what I want using boring old text. It will be video-based, however, and I'm excited to see the final result.

Backing up a bit, "in the beginning..." I was given a Job Task Analysis indicating the steps a section foreman is to take at the end of his or her shift. When I lay out ideas for further development of these steps, I'm told they're "too simple." However, this is all I've been given to work with, and since there is no official "end of shift" examination, Google and other searches have proven fruitless in finding out additional information about these duties. I have been tapping the SMEs for information. Last week there was a mining disaster, though, giving the SMEs some higher priority work than e-mailing ambiguous information about end of shift duties. I think I have enough information and media now, though, to develop an educational and (as much as Workforce Connections will allow it) engaging training module.

Also, Immersion has exposed to a wide array of new technologies, whether through a classmate, professor, or just simply stumbling on them by accident. It's fun. Every day, it seems, I discover a cool new web-based, usually open source, technology that could apply to our training system or that I could recommend for use in a higher education setting. Today's is "YouSendIt," which enables you to send files up to 100MB for free. It's very useful. Check it out.

posted by Allison @ 12:17 AM