Overview

This concept piece serves as part of the onboarding process for newsroom employees at a major newspaper. Employees will review the guidelines, practice applying them to hypothetical scenarios they may encounter in their new position, and finally take a quiz to measure their understanding.

Features

GUIDELINES: In order to reflect the reality of working in a newsroom, the five big ideas that comprise the social media guidelines in this eLearning are based on the social media guidelines put forth by the New York Times. To better ensure a transfer of knowledge to the learners, I combed the many key points, then categorized and distilled them into five overarching principles to guide behavior on social media platforms.

VIDEO: To increase engagement, this project begins with an original video edited in Camtasia. This asset utilizes original scripting and voiceover (edited in Audacity), as well as graphics and watermarks developed in Adobe Illustrator, and stock videos provided by Pexels. Background music was provided by Poddington Bear of FreeMusicArchive.

MENTOR CHARACTER & CHARACTER SELECTOR: At the beginning of the course, learners are introduced to two supervisors and asked to select a mentor for the remainder of the experience. This mentor character is displayed alongside all knowledge checks, where they provide hints in the event that the learner is struggling. All of the graphics used for these mentor figures are from Storyset, but many of the vectors were edited in Adobe Illustrator to better suit the need of this course.

INTERACTIONS: In order to ensure that learners engage with the material, rather than clicking through ‘til completion, varied interactions have been utilized. Dials, sliders, animations, & variables invite the learner to engage with the content in a meaningful way before moving forward.

KNOWLEDGE CHECKS: This course makes use of formal & informal knowledge checks, primarily by way of scenario-based questioning. The final quiz, which learners are required to complete with 80% accuracy, draws from multiple question banks to ensure varied experiences by user.

Reflection

I really enjoyed building out this project because it provided me with the opportunity to flex multiple creative muscles at once. When I shared it with SMEs from the media industry, they reflected on the bright and upbeat style, the relevance of the hypothetical scenarios, and the fact that it was unlike many of the trainings that they’ve been responsible for completing, in that it wasn’t one they wanted to simply “click through.”

I would love to continue building this project out as a single module in part of a more comprehensive onboarding experience.