Building A Digital Education Experience
By: Luciana Mignelli
Tags: Learning, E Learning, Content, Lms, Education

Photo by Scott Graham on Unsplash

Authors: Guillermina Peralta Guerra, Marcos Werner and Luciana Mignelli

A content and e-learning education project encourages the exploitation of a developing business potential in the digital industry. In turn, it brings with it specific difficulties of practice.

What follows is an eight-month story working on the implementation of an educational purpose site. At this point, we can stop and reflect on the tensions between “potential” and “difficulties”. Are you ready to relive this experience with us?

The journey begins… what about difficulties?

Starting a new project involves a high level of stress, this is practically guaranteed. There are uncertainties, constant calls with the customers, and some nervousness before the unknown, why not?

In this particular tour, the first thing we came across was that — although we all spoke the same language — there was a specific jargon as regards Instructional Design and Education that should be known by everyone. This has been a particular challenge, especially when top leaders identify themselves more within technologies rather than within the learning field. Later, we will stop to think a little bit more about the awareness effort made. Instructional Design Models; Virtual Classroom; Asynchronous Learning and Learning Management System were some of the first terms to be defined.

But… Do the challenges remain?

The first task agreed with the customer consisted of generating Job Aids step by step on how to build a virtual environment for Linux, macOS, and Windows. This was an assignment constrained by means of MVP, but it was a huge trigger to start linking with the customer. To do this, we followed a good practices style guide and applied its indications to the materials we made. As we added contacts with experts and possible students, we realized that our learners had quite a different profile from the usual one: the majority of them were developers. For that reason, we needed to “adapt” our good practices when generating the guides, since our target public turned out to be highly instructed in the subject.

For example, it is redundant to explain to a programmer to click enter after inserting a command. Then, the content should be displayed in a format appropriate for their level, for their learning forms, for their used typefaces, etc. At the same time, these factors had to be adapted according to the customer’s tone and voice guide. In this sense, the difficulty turned into learning: all models and good practices exist to be adapted to your audience. We knew that the students’ level of training had to be taken into account. But we had never come across an already defined guide to follow and an audience of developers as well.

An extra difficulty can always be found… or two in fact.

This Pandemic forced us to turn our course of action recurrently. We found that we no longer had a main product owner setting a specific course and giving us feedback on our work.

In addition, we didn’t have a Learning Management System (LMS). Client-proposed solution: we were provided with a SharePoint that we customized to make it navigable. Was it a solution? Well, it could be called a “limiting” one, but adaptability can also be surprising: this was one of the biggest challenges since the ideal scenario would have been to have an LMS. Therefore, constant efforts were made to try to imitate this type of platform with a more limited one. An LMS allows tracking student progress, assessment methods, career planning, or content search alternatives. Unfortunately, such activities are not possible on SharePoint. In this way, the whole team participated in the analysis of the created project giving its vision about the components, buttons, navigability, etc.

The top part of the adaptation was consolidated with the creation of a University in SharePoint. We all agree that the concept of “University” drives us to an educational field. This is why we tried to give that entity to our site. We generated a point of convergence where different courses and pieces of training valuable for the client’s internal audience could be found.

Light at the end of the tunnel

Don’t truly believe us. Not everything meant difficulty, and, in fact, we all learn from difficulties as well. It is worth mentioning some achievements:

We created an interdisciplinary POD with profiles like Instructional Designer, Content Strategist, Content Creator, Visual Designer, Business Analyst, and Project Manager. In this way, we developed, with integrative views, content in varied formats such as videos, infographics, PPTs, blueprints, roadmaps, etc. Once our University was created on SharePoint, we began filling it with content. From pieces of training about Agile methodologies to Python programming technologies, Career Pathing and Customer Experience. We delineated our own workflow when generating content: discovery, course design, content production, material searching, QA, design, translation, publishing, and iteration.

Last but not least

As we mentioned before, constantly raising awareness among those who are not included in practice was part of the process. Explaining and supporting each decision involves certain exhaustion, but it is necessary to give an account of the planning and the effort required by each publication. Digital Education background processes aren’t often recognized by people within a software development world or with traditional business objectives. Therefore, a great deal of energy is put into “educating” superior spheres to respect the fact that the educational content cannot or should not be taken lightly.

In this sense, the “double effort” — meaning that of educating both the target public and the client — comes from determining the limit among what requests could be part of an educational site and what could not. Let’s be clear: we are not creating a repository in which to deposit all the material that doesn’t fit in a specific place. We are creating an educational experience that includes a digital platform, the concept of university, and quality content. All this has a clear objective: to increase productivity and loyalty through education.

This is how, during these months, different aspects have been consolidated to summarize the educational work made. Internal training has been carried out, we have adapted a student-focused platform, we have created constant-iterated content, among others.

We can see how complex the number of aspects linked to a digital teaching process is, they are more than expected as well. But that’s not the reason they should be considered unmanageable or limiting, they will be also challenges determining the objectives’ quality and achievement.