Enga
ging Learners with Online Training is a five-part blog series featuring stories from E-learning Institute Fellowship (ELI) alumni. Alumni have different stories to tell about the impact ELI had on their work in public health.
My former supervisors at the Yale Office of Public Health Practice and the Connecticut Department of Public Health (on contract) recommended my participation in ELI. They thought it would be great opportunity for me to develop the knowledge and skills needed to build a high quality, sustainable online training product for a larger state project focusing on infection prevention in an ambulatory care setting.
By participating in ELI, I learned about the pros and cons of the most commonly used e-learning authoring tools (my training used Articulate Storyline 2), how adults think, learn and relate to content matter, and the steps needed to build an online training. Specific lessons that I learned were: using high contrast colors, not crowding the screen with too much information and graphics, and making sure that the online training product is truly 508 compliant. Ultimately, ELI provided me the opportunity to think critically about translating information to a diverse audience and making a compliant (and creative!) course accessible to learners with hearing, visual or language barriers.
Managing my professional time was an important aspect of successfully completing ELI. At my former position, I had two offices but only one office had Articulate Storyline 2. As a result, I had to manage my time, project deliverables, and meetings to accommodate when I would be at the office with Articulate Storyline 2. I am proud that I was able to simultaneously manage my professional responsibilities and ELI assignments.
As a part of a larger project, the completion of my online learning product, Foundations of Infection Prevention in the Ambulatory Care Setting, provides background information to learners who may not be familiar with infection prevention principles and basic microbiology. The end goal is to assure that all staff in the ambulatory care setting will be able to understand the basics of preventing infections. This training is delivered within ambulatory care settings across Connecticut to teach staff, whether they are trained clinical professionals, administrative staff, facilities staff or volunteers, how to reduce the spread of infection.
In September 2016, I returned to graduate school for a master of public administration degree. The knowledge and skills I learned from ELI have helped me execute new and creative graduate school projects geared towards building high quality, low cost trainings for employees in government, nonprofit or academic organizations.