Soft Skills Courses for Threat Prevention Technology Brand

Overview

Navigate360, a national organization focused on safety and well-being in both schools and the workplace had an immediate need to develop and implement a well-rounded curriculum for their partners on social-emotional skills.

This included program offerings centered around instructor-led trainings and self-paced eLearning courses. The company was looking for vibrant and engaging course content that was on-brand and contained story-based lessons led by relatable characters.

One year after these learning experiences were implemented, Navigate360 was recognized with an EdTech Breakthrough Award for the program this curriculum I designed was a part of.

Needs Analysis

I worked with stakeholders to conduct initial analysis and discovered that many of the learners had not been granted the proper time or resources to specifically learn about mental health, social-emotional well-being, and essential soft skills.

Using Clark & Lyon's Visual Design Model, I defined project goals, designed the visual approach, identified the communication approach, and planned for each of the instructional events before diving into the design for the storyboard, and eventually the development of the courses.

Design & Development

I wrote the initial scripts in an informal style with a conversational tone. Best practices were used while scripting each scene, including using active voice over passive voice, avoiding run on sentences, avoiding sentences that expressed more than one idea, and avoiding double negatives.

I then led storyboarding with the L&D team to ensure that the SME’s vision was being captured for each event, allowing them to review every iteration before we went too far down any path with our content. As one consistent hurdle during the development was the desire for a lot of animation and interactivity (with very short turnaround times), I found that storyboarding and prototyping was a good way to eliminate the need for heavy rework at each phase.

Animated video development was done in Vyond and the rest of the course (course shell, knowledge checks, assessment materials, etc.) was developed in Articulate Storyline. Using these tools in tandem allowed me to ensure a consistent style was met and that our developed solutions were up to par with the expectations of the stakeholders and SMEs.

Results

The video-based courses were intended to reinforce the learning objectives through active engagement and interactive elements that were overlayed on screen. It gave learners the chance to play, pause, and rewind wherever needed, before recapping the learning with a summary and final activity.

Although incorrect feedback was not always provided, we supported self-accomplishment amongst learners as they completed each task. Additionally, the UI of the learning experience ensured that learners could track their progress and return to revisit previously completed lessons whenever they wished.

Click to view a sample of one of the interactive courses below.

Related Project

Following this SEL project for Navigate360, I was contracted to create courses on Growth Mindset and Mindfulness for another non-profit organization.

Below are some sample slides from that learning solution.