- Description: The purpose of my digital learning resource is to make the process of online learning more simple and convenient for nomadic workers by allowing them to complete quizzes digitally instead of printing them out on paper then scanning or faxing them back to the organization’s office.
- Learning Goals: Learning goals will be considered accomplished when safety training quizzes have passing grades and meet legislative requirements.
- Intended Audience: Transient contract trades workers.
- Rationale: This resource should meet the needs of the intended audience by making it far more convenient for them to complete their mandatory training online.
- Tools: A few of my peers have suggested I use Google Forms to create online quizzes. This tool is appealing because it is free and appears to be fairly versatile. Once I arrive at the prototype stage, I may try other similar tools if this one does not meet stakeholder needs.
- Assessment Plan: The quizzes will be automatically graded to ensure learners pass and meet legislative standards.
- Learning Theories & Instructional Design Principles Used: Adult Learning Theory and Mobile Learning Theory will guide this project. Kelly (2006) explains how adult learners “expect more from their educational sessions because their time is valuable” (para. 28) and they “have other roles that counterbalance the significance of their role as a learner” (para. 28). Mobile devices are ubiquitous and they present many learning opportunities (Sharples, Taylor, & Vavoula, 2005), and workers who travel around following jobs tend to have smartphones with good data plans which gives us an opportunity to make learning more accessible for them. This project will also be supported with the assistance of some design principles: listen to user-feedback; facilitate user-friendliness to be respectful of the busy-adult-learners’ time; plan for future users as well as current users; and always be open to evolution and improvement.
- Instructions for Use: Learners will receive the link to the digital safety training and electronic quiz in an email-based orientation package. They will complete the quiz and hit a “submit” button which will forward their results to the organization’s admin.
- Plan for Use: This resource will not be open because the safety training is for specific jobs within a particular company, not for learning about something like photography which might be of larger interest to the general public. This resource will only be used to demonstrate learning by one organization’s workers for certain temporary jobs.
I am open to feedback from peers, especially if anyone can suggest cheap or free tools for electronic documents or applications which can embed submittable quizzes into online learning materials. I’m going to start by trying Google Forms but am open to other options if anyone has found something better.
References
Kelly, M. H. (2006). Teach an old dog new tricks: Training techniques for the adult learner. Professional Safety, 51(8), 44.
Sharples, M., Taylor, J., & Vavoula, G. (2005, October). Towards a theory of mobile learning. In Proceedings of mLearn (Vol. 1, No. 1, pp. 1-9).
Hi Angie, thanks for sharing your draft design plan – this is something that I’ve seen many organizations struggle with and is a great design challenge to work on. I have some feedback (in the format of ‘I like, I wish, What if’) based on my understanding of your project from your plan:
I like that your purpose is well-defined and appears to be in a good scope for this assignment. I struggled with this myself, but yours was very clear. I liked how your purpose led me to understand how the learning theory and instructional design principles that you have chosen relate to the goals of this project overall and for the learner. I thought they were in great alignment.
I wish I understood what the term ‘legislative requirements’ meant in the context of this project, as this was something that I wasn’t certain of what it meant and therefore, how it affected your design, if at all. I also wish I had more ideas to offer you than the Google Forms suggestion . I can tell you that I have seen Articulate Rise used for online quizzes after face-to-face learning, but it is not free like Google forms.
What if the organization needs to track the learning? Can this design accommodate these needs or are they perhaps not important to the organization(s) to track? I am curious whether the quiz results would need to fit into another system (ie. LMS, HR system) and whether this would create another issue for manual work to input them.
Hope this feedback is helpful for you as you move to prototyping!
Hi Nicolette, thank you for your helpful feedback.
“Legislative requirements” refers to the OH&S rules about workers passing the safety training that is relevant to the specific job/task/industry/location/conditions they are working in.
In this case, workers must receive WHMIS training, pass the quiz, and the organization must retain record of it.
In regards to your question about tracking the learning, we receive an email notification with the quiz results, and we can also access all of the quiz results for everyone who has taken the quiz. I have been sending my prototype to coworkers and yesterday I sent it to the head of admin who is responsible for collecting our safety training data, so I am awaiting feedback on if that part of it will be user-friendly too.
Thanks again for taking the time and helping me think about different angles.
Hi Angie,
Thank you for your insightful post! I like the fact that you are considering to use Google Forms to create an online quiz. I have used Google forms in the past and will be using it again for my digital learning resource, and I can say that it is a user-friendly tool. I wish we had an opportunity to get together and help each other with the quizzes for our digital learning resource. However, since it is not possible, what if we try to connect via Google Hangout and give each other some pointers about the online quiz?
Thank you!
May
Great idea to meet online and bounce ideas off each other May. I’ve sent you an email to arrange that.