Supplemental Scenario-Based Videos: M1 Blog Post

I appreciated our video chat the other day.  I went into our discussion knowing I wanted a project that I would use for my business.  I am happy to say that I have decided on a project because of your suggestions in our video chat.  Social interaction at its finest as pointed out by the three authors, Kelly, Laurillard, and Bates, we read/watched this week.  My project will be to create supplemental, scenario-based videos. 

Audience

My audience will be comprised of adults in the workforce who have attended our hands-on, instructor-led, training courses.  These videos will come in handy to help the learners focus on a specific workplace related task. Like most training, my organization has a day to cover the plethora of topics for which we were contracted to cover.  Unfortunately, that means sacrificing some of the time allotted to address everything by giving a general understanding of how to use the tool and in what context the tool should be used. 

Contextual Factors and how to Address

In training, there are two primary contextual factors impacting the learner’s ability fully understand the benefits of the tool, relevancy and time. The primary affecting factor is the frequent inability for our learner to transition from training or practice to real-life needs (Laurillard, 2012).  Being the most important, this factor will dictate the theme of the videos.  The videos will review “How To” situations to perform a common series of tasks based on a scenario. These scenarios will be based on common workplace tasks, such as, How to create and easily edit large documents using Word, How to manage an unruly inbox in using Outlook, and How to review large data to make strategic business decisions using Excel. In this case, using popular business tools, such as Word, Outlook, and Excel our clients will be more likely to transition the skills learned in class to their workplace tasks.

Another contextual factor that might affect our client’s ability to understand the tool is time.  To address this factor, the scenarios will be available via the cloud giving our clients the ability to access the videos with an internet connection anytime, anywhere.  Navigation will be included in the video so the client can navigate to any part of the video for either rereview or in case they needed to view the video in smaller increments.

In Context to Readings

All three authors from this week’s readings have addresses the need for social learning (“Kevin Kelly: The Next 30 Digital Years - The Long Now,” 2016) and accessibility of the learning. Creating learning that is more closely resembling a workplace situation, however, addressing the need to keep learning flexible more closely represents what both Kelly and Laurillard suggest regarding formal learning and its morph into more social, on-demand learning. Ideally, these videos would be available through an LMS, where there is still the opportunity for access anytime, anywhere.  Additionally, there would be an area where our clients could converse with each other on best practices, pose questions that are moderated by both a facilitator and other course participants. Perhaps giving the environment more of a MOOC feel suggested by Bates. It is not my intent to create a MOOC. I’m still torn on the idea of MOOCs or how one would create an engaging environment that if both effective for learning and cost effective for an organization my size (Bates, 2015).

The scenarios suggested above were selected based on both client questions and my experience over the years.  To make this more manageable, I will focus on one, How to create and easily edit large documents using Word, to be able to address all the components necessary.  There are many items to address in this one task. They include, styles, sections, page numbering, etc. For our organization, we would want to use these supplemental videos primarily as a value add for our clients. I can certainly see the benefits of giving access to these videos to prospective clients to showcase our training, eLearning capabilities, and types of training we can provide.  We would consider the added benefits for marketability once we provided the videos.  I’m not sure we have the capacity to compete with other organizations already providing these types of services to extend outside of our existing client base.

References

Bates, A. W. (Tony). (2015). Teaching in a Digital Age. Retrieved from https://opentextbc.ca/teachinginadigitalage/

Kevin Kelly: The Next 30 Digital Years - The Long Now. (2016, July). Retrieved January 21, 2018, from http://longnow.org/seminars/02016/jul/14/next-30-digital-years/

Laurillard, D. (2012). Teaching as a Design Science: Building Pedagogical Patterns for Learning and Technology. London: Taylor and Francis. Retrieved from http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/empire-ebooks/detail.action?docID=957058