Peace Corps - E-Learning at the Peace Corps: A Moodle Deployment Story and Lessons Learned

For the Peace Corps, eLearning is a critical enabling technology supporting the growth of a culture of continuous learning, and a key component of agency knowledge management.

They use an iceberg metaphor where there are a few “above the water” formal learning efforts (Lynda.com, webinars, and their online learning), but underneath are many aspects of informal learning such as YouTube.

Their first LMS was in 2010. There were two separate learning management systems – one for volunteers and one for staff. They decided to upgrade and merge the two.

It is important to have a vision about what you are trying to accomplish with eLearning. For the Peace Corps it was a commitment for all staff and volunteers to be able to learn, grown, and support the mission to the best of their ability and collaboratively work across the agency to promote a global culture of continuous learning. The new LMS was intended to be less about compliance and more about being mobile friendly, and creating learning paths and competency frameworks.

They created a two-minute video for kick off to explain/motivate. Implementation was stressful and complicated, developed a commitment to “radical candor”. An online team space critical to focusing on work, not the meetings.

Deciding on the URL name was a complicated process of hearing from all the stakeholders. Settting up an SSL cert was quite complicated as well.

They wanted a single sign-on (SAML-SSO) for staff so they wouldn’t need passwords. They couldn’t offer this to volunteers accessing the system remotely, so instead set it up so that they could have one click sign-on through their social media accounts such as Facbook, Google, Microsoft, Linkedin or Instagram.

An LMS is a “living system” that evolves all the time.

“Digital Learning Week” with lots of training and presentations to let people know what is happening. Webinars and other events to show its’ appeals.

Invest as much time as you can for buy-in for all stakeholders. Creating a working group that engaged key stakeholders. Use whatever networks you can to continue the communities of practice. Find your superusers, embrace them and lift up their voice. – your chief promoters, eLearning rock stars.

Continued to use their help desk.  Courses range from 20 minutes to 27 months, depending on content and purpose. 27 month a TOEFL certification course for volunteers.

Mercy Medical Center: Developing a Band of Excellence through Gamification - Nurse Onboarding

I was quite inspired by Dr. Stacey Brull, Senior Director of Research, Education and Informatics. Her presentation showcased remarkably effective, but relatively simple games made with Storyline and free online software. Here are some key takeaways:

• Going to gaming was a slow process, from traditional print materials, video, and eLearning before.

• Gaming is a huge market. 63% of mobile gamers are female, and many play daily. Most are adult. So a nice match with their target audience (nurses).

• From Simple to Complex

  • Plug and play games – easy, online, download, put your questions and content in. can set up in an hour, looks good.

    • C3softworks. created a games on how to mop a floor, wash hands properly etc. for staff. Had slot machine, questions, points. Went over well.

    • Classcraft – learners create an avatar, competed with other teams. More for K-12 but worked for this purpose

    • Goodsechase – scavenger hunt. They are in teams, have missions where they have to take photos of various things (specific staff members, policies ) and upload

    • Kahoot! – questions, people compete against others in the room, can see how others do

  • Customized games

    • games made with authorizing software to customize – such as articulate or captivate

    •  “strike-out stroke” – play the game, take a quiz through a QR code

  • Gamification

    • putting game like thing into a non-game context

    • getting points, “level-up”, put you on a leaderboard

    • they like to give prizes – not expensive things, but people are motivated by receiving things

  • Immersive gaming

    Their original program was 5 days of orientation – in a classroom costly and not effective. Cognitive overload.

  • Now a game with islands to visit (World of Salus), content areas, they can take competency test, but everyone actually likes to visit the content area and not just take the test. Learners can go to as many “knowledge objects” as they want, but do have to take all the competency tests.

  •  Another about leadership styles, where they can learn more about their leadership style with cards they can pick

• Nurses are more competitive then she thought, they will do the knowledge objects over and over to get higher and higher on the leaderboard.

• Staff loved it, reviewed favorably.

• Quantatively, they could compare at LMS group, classroom group and gamification group and gamification group scored higher on all content tests.

• Could see how much money was saved.

• Article in the journal of nursing admin.

• Virtual reality

  • just at the cusp of this

  • crash cart blitz – how to respond to emergency codes quickly without having to practice on patients in crisis (not really feasible).

  •  Video news report on mindgrub

• VR can be used on hospitalized patients to send them to a peaceful world that calms them down and reduces pain scores.

A Dream Conference for Simone

As someone who is both an instructional designer and a video maker, I was delighted to learn that Winter 2018’s Government Video Expo had added a Learning Technology Symposium. Here’s are some key takeaways from some of the panels I attended, which I’ll dribble out on a weekly basis.

The Importance of Making Distance Learning Accessible to All

1. ALT text is the brief description of an image on a website or online learning that is revealed by accessibility devices if provided. It is “absolutely critical” and should include at least what is depicted, and ideally more description if the image shows a process or other concept.

2. Web content accessibility guidelines (WCAG) were first developed for the web, and are now being adapted for elearning. They are now at version 2.0, but still a work in progress, and not fully implemented.

3. Internet browsers (chrome, explorer etc.) are guided by “user agent accessibility guidelines” so that they will correctly display content that is developed with WCAG guidelines.

4. As a designer, you need to be taking them into account in:

a.     The e-learning authoring tools you choose

b.     The actual courses you design

c.      Any templates you create

d.     The LMS (note – moodle is theoretically best on accessibility, but “nobody uses it”)

e.     Any options the subject matter expert or learner has to create content.

5. When saving to PDF, make sure you meet PDF UA requirements. These are like WCAG, but somewhat stronger and designed to be relevant to PDF technology.

6. section508.gov offers free courses and certification.

Webinar: Power of Story with Dr. Jonathan Peters, Chief Motivational Officer of Sententia Gamification

Key Takeaways from this 12/5/18 Webinar:

1. A story is at the most basic level, just “cause and effect”. This is how we get superstitions - I danced, and it rained.

2. When looking at the course of human history, we learned language relatively late, and reading even later. Taking tests to verify knowledge is a relatively recent development, and perhaps not what our brains were really evolved to do.

3. Our goal as learning designers is to entice, engage, and encourage our learners.

4. Stories help the learner relate to the instructor and the material - especially as an introduction.

5. Dr. Peters demonstrated this technique with a story about a training he had to do in business grammar where the audience was at first bored, then distracted by a much more interesting adjacent presentation. This is a situation that would be very related to an audience of trainers.

6. This particular type of story is called “a mess to success” story.

7. Story is a way for us to store information, retrieve it and share it.

8. You can use common stories, many of which are in public domain. But be aware of copyright. Dr. Peters gave an example of a team member who had to re-design a boring training about wage garnishment and payroll deductions. Created a “Snow White” story with characters who represented the seven dwarves and the hunter without using the precise title “Snow White and the Seven Dwarves”.

9. When telling a story that doesn’t relate to the learners experiences, use analogies and metaphors so that their learners’ brains will make connections and fill in the gaps. Perth Australia is like San Diego etc.

10. No matter how good your training - the “water cooler” will always be more powerful. Story telling is hard-wired into our brains.

11. When we tell stories, scientists are seeing certain chemicals released in the brain. Examples include the stress hormones of cortisol and adrenaline, and/or endorfins, dopamine and oxytocin. However, different people have different levels of receptors for these various brain chemicals. For example, sociopaths don’t have oxytocin receptors, so they are unmoved by stories of suffering. This is all a new field of research, with much to be discovered.