Working With Instructional Designers

Curious about how I work with eLearning clients?

Sometimes my clients are small independent operators, just looking for help with Facebook or YouTube videos so they can teach prospects about their products and services.

But usually I’m working with larger organizations to design sophisticated online training and certification courses that are delivered through a learning management system (LMS) with printed materials, activities, quizzes, and tests.

In these cases I work alongside the Instructional Designer (ID), who is a specialist responsible for designing and organizing the online 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; then they forward the relevant SME documents to me.

The SMEs are very smart people who are experts in their fields, but they generally aren’t teachers and aren’t necessarily good at clearly communicating their specialized knowledge to learners who are not yet experts themselves.

So the SME docs can be very dense 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 I can keep learners engaged in the material, I can help improve knowledge retention and training completion rates.

Then I take the optimized SME content and write eLearning scripts for the narrator and the actors to record.

All of this is done in stages, with review and input from the ID to ensure everyone’s staying on track with the teaching goals of the distance learning provider.

Got a big idea to share? Let’s talk about it!

Here’s an example of an online course I wrote for Care Academy. The video starts at the beginning of one of the scenarios, but I wrote all the narration portions as well.