Project Overview
It’s no secret that remote work has increased substantially since the Covid pandemic, but even before then, it was on the rise. This course seeks to help remote workers face those challenges head-on with practical and helpful solutions. When developing this course, I kept the content intentionally broad so that any company could purchase this course as part of their well-being or onboarding materials. The end result is a course that could reach many people that want to make their remote working environment the best it can be. I also developed supplemental learning material that users could quickly and easily access to help remind them of the things they learned in the course.
Audience
Remote workers
Managers
Remote-first organizations
responsibilities
Instructional design
eLearning development
Graphic design
Tools Used
Articulate Rise 360
Canva
Design Process
To begin, I researched the challenges facing remote workers today. After reviewing several studies, I came up with a list of the most common issues I discovered and recording the research to support them.
From there, I created a design document to organize the content, which helped me determine that Rise 360 was the best authoring tool for this course.
The next step was to begin creating the learning experience in Rise 360. I really like working in this program because the user experience as an instructional designer is very intuitive. I decided the course would be best to navigate if each of the challenges I identified was a lesson of its own, which made the setup very clean and easily understandable.
Creating the content was very quick and easy since I had the research and design document for reference, and then I needed to decide which interactions were best suited for each one. Interactive components are more limited in Rise 360 than Storyline 360, so picking the right activities and varying them appropriately was a challenge.
After getting feedback from other instructional designers and remote-based test users, I ended up adding even more variety and changed the structure of the "Managing Distractions" lesson to include an additional interactive component.
I also felt that I needed images that really matched the content, so I created images in Canva to visually communicate what was happening on screen, such as this woman who is enjoying a healthy work-life balance in a place where she can both work and play.
Full Development
The final eLearning experience for “Creating a Positive Remote Working Environment” is sharp and easy to navigate. Its interactive components encourage the user to engage in their learning in a simple, yet reflective, way. One of the best things about this course is that its potential reach is quite large; with so many companies implementing hybrid or fully remote work environments, it would be easy for this course to be further customized to a company’s individual needs and challenges. This type of course is also really important because a company that requires its employees to participate in a course like this one demonstrates empathy for the well-being of employees, a trait that is of the utmost importance in today’s increasingly digital world.
Supplemental Learning Material
Because of the important nature of this learning experience, I felt it imperative to offer users a tool to help remember what they learned about creating a positive remote working environment without necessarily needing to take the course. That is why I developed this helpful infographic that would be shared with users upon completion of the course. Users could download the infographic and reference it any time they needed a reminder of ways to improve their remote working space.
Results and Takeaways
I really enjoyed developing this course in Rise 360. As an authoring tool, it is incredibly intuitive and offers a lot of great customization options. I did feel somewhat limited by the interactive activities because they are not nearly as customizable as in Storyline 360, but the options I went with created a very clean, clear user experience.
All of the test users for this project were remote workers, and their feedback helped me ensure that all the content was easy to understand and felt valuable to them. In the prototype round, I was relying too much on bullet points instead of putting the content in more digestible forms, and the users gave me the feedback that it felt like too much reading without enough visual elements to break up the text. The end result was a course that is more interactive and includes better chunking.
The incorporation of the supplemental learning materials also gives this course a more robust feeling, indicating that the things discovered in this eLearning experience are meant to be remembered and applied beyond just the course.
Ideally, this course would be customized even further based on the company’s needs. For example, a more robust health and wellness component could be added if the company offered mindfulness or fitness courses. This further highlights the potential this course has to meet the needs of a large sector of the working population.