Curious about what I do for #distancelearning clients?
I work alongside the Instructional Designer (ID), who is a specialist responsible for designing and organizing the course. They work with the Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) to define the overall educational goals of the course, and develop supplemental materials like quizzes and tests, downloadable support assets like workbooks and syllabi, and interactive content.
The ID determines which portion of the material needs to be presented with narration or scenarios, which are short scenes using actors to demonstrate best practices, and then forwards the relevant SME documents to me.
The SMEs are very smart people who are experts in their fields; but they often (usually?) aren’t teachers, and in my ten years of experience aren’t necessarily good at decrypting their specialized knowledge for learners who are not yet expert themselves.
So the SME docs can be very dense, hermetic, and technical in ways that don’t lend themselves to knowledge transfer.
My job is to review, edit, organize, and simplify the SME content so it’s more accessible and engaging while retaining its educational value. If we can keep learners engaged in the material, we can improve knowledge retention and training completion rates.
Then I take the optimized SME content and write scripts for the narrator and the actors to record.
All of this is done in stages, with reviews and input from the ID to ensure we’re all staying on track with the teaching goals of the distance learning provider.
Here’s an example of a course I worked on for Care Academy. The video starts at the beginning of one of the scenarios, but I also wrote all the narration portions as well.
#amwriting #sreenwriting