Making it effective
There are internal and external factors that influence the productivity of an organization. One such external influence is the federal government who requires each resident in nursing homes must have a health assessment. Each nursing home designates staff to complete these assessments. The people designated receive training in several ways. 1) On the job, from a person who is currently or was previously in the position, 2) On the job, by reading a 500+ page manual or 3) Attending their State sponsored training.
When I took over as the State Assessment Training Coordinator, I read the 500+ page manual. The information is comprehensive and dry. The question I began asking myself was how to make this boring but important information appealing. What information do I include and what information is just nice to know? Because the training attendees are a mixture of experiences working with the assessment tool, it must appeal to the novice assessment coordinator and to the coordinator that have been coding assessments for years.
After a few trials and errors of presenting three-day training on the entire manual, I learned few tricks:
1) I spiced up the powerpoint presentations by incorporating short films of residents performing actions. The participants are asked how they would code that action.
2) After each section, scenarios are presented and the participants are asked how they would code the action.
3) Matching and true and false games questions were incorporated into the presentation
4) To help the learners find information in the manual, I devised a scavenger hunt exercise.
5) Finally, social sharing is used where homes talk about how things are done in their facility as a problem solving technique for another home.
I am in the beginning stages of learning about instruction design and technology. My goal is to keep it simple but effective.
http://www.langevin.com/blog/2009/08/27/walk-in-the-shoes-of-the-learners/
