The Problem: Green Bowl Eatery (a ficticious chain restaurant created for this concept project) identified their premade salad dressings as a major loss of revenue.  They launched a salad dressing recipe contest, and the three winning dressings have been a huge marketing success.  Unfortunately, employees are struggling to recreate the recipes which is waisting resources and lowering customer reviews. 

The Solution: After completing a needs analysis via survey, it was discovered that many employees could not differentiate between ingredients. An elearning training was requested so that employees could gain practice with identification of the ingredients and with building the three winning dressings.  

After creating the context for this concept project, I contacted a local restaurant chef to act as my SME.  He walked me through essential ingredients, broke down the steps used to combine them, and explained that the base ingredient as being both the most imperative step and the most commonly misidentified ingredient.  With this information I got to work coming up with out outline that included some extra attention to the base ingredient.

Next I moved into the design stage and created a full storyboard to organize the content and layout for the project.  Rather than using full visual mock-ups, I used quick graphics as placeholders so that I could save time and keep the content as the primary focus.  I left space for client feedback - if this project were truly in process I would want to make sure all stakeholders approved of this step before moving on to development. 

I created a style guide based around a green color scheme and used some templates for inspiration.  I chose background graphics that resembled salad dressing speed out, drizzled in a line, and splattered for a subtle extention of the learning theme.    I also wanted to have a consistent look for the ingredients and decided to go with vector graphics to ensure that learners would truly be able to sort them.    

A key adult learning principle that I wanted to explore in this project is personal connection to the content.  Therefore, I decided to use an audio-heavy format with both male and female narrators to make it feel more like an in-person training.  Additionally, I sought out realistic voices for the recipe creators and designed them to have implied diversity. 

The development phase progressed quickly once I started combining my storyboard with the style guide.  Putting together the slides visually was straightforward.  However, it took me a lot of research and trial and error to achieve the variety and complexity of the experiences I wanted to provide (two-sided dial, seek-and-find with progress tracker,  multi-slide drag-and-drop).  Overall, I was very happy with the final result and this project really helped me to further improve my skill-set in the development stage of instructional design. 

Highlights: 

I wanted to create a realistic feel to the farmer's market (seek-and-find) module of this course.  I added distraction graphics (people, foods, etc) and soft background chatter to purposefully strain the learner's cognitive load.  My intention with this approach was to ensure that learners can successfully identify ingredients even with stressors (which they will likely be facing in their real world work setting).  

After recently completing a course through Novoed on using AI in Learning and Development projects,  I knew I wanted to incorporate some AI elements into this training.  Since I wanted to lean heavily on audio for this project, I decided to focus on exploring how AI voices could enhance a learning and create a realistic setting for the learner.  Articulate Storyline has added new AI features, including voice options.  I found that some words took a lot of experimenting to get the pronunciation just right!  I also found that I needed extra time and attention to editing closed captions for the AI voices.  In addition to voices, I used a few AI generated sound effects (crowd chatter in the farmer's market and applause at course conclusion). While I likely could have found examples of these similar effects online, using the AI option helped me to get exactly what I needed in an instant and saved me a lot of time.  One final way that I incorporated AI was to brainstorm and refine content, such as the context for the recipe creators.  My AI prompt writing significantly improved as I edited and expanded the storyboard, and I am excited to see how AI can continue to be incorporated into my future projects.  

Improvements: 

I believe that all people should be able to have quality learning experiences despite any special needs they may have.  While I feel I did a good job making this project accessible for hearing impaired learners, I would like to further improve access to learners using the keyboard or devices other than computers.  I also would like to have more descriptive alt-text for the many images and icons used in the training so that visually-impared learners can have an improved experience.  I will be working to incorporate these adjustments in an updated version of this learning experience in the near future. 

An extension to the learning that I would like to create (perhaps as an additional follow-up learning experience) would be to further explore the portions and measurements of ingredients needed for different recipes.  My SME praised the consistency and thoroughness of my training's focus on the primary learning target of ingredient differentiation.  However, he agreed that even once a learner can choose the correct ingredients, the next step would be ensure they use enough/not too much of it.