Mindscaling recently completed one of our more meaningful and productive custom solutions to date. The end product was both a complete elearning curriculum customized for their content, as well as a custom leadership development curriculum that featured our own content and expertise.
The Client
Our client is an emerging health care support company. It’s the kind of company that cares for aging loved ones who want to remain at home as they grow older. This company is doing the work of relieving family caregivers of the “carenundrum” of caring for parents and relatives. That carenundrum is the associated stressors and challenges of family members trying to care for elderly loved ones while simultaneously maintaining and growing their own families and careers. It can be exhausting, mentally and physically. And that problem is only growing as the boomer generation continues to age.
The impact on family caregivers trying to balance work and family is taking a toll:
If you have aging loved ones, you understand that this work can get complicated, with environmental and living space assessments, planning for services, and coordinating extended family members and clinical staff. And then there’s insurance complexities that continue to unravel.
The work of this company’s Care Guides – licensed social workers – requires a deep sense of love, care, attention and dedication. This is complicated, and sometimes, exhausting work. Then throw in a pandemic on top of it.
The Challenge
The primary challenge they presented us with was that they were growing so fast and onboarding new Care Guides so quickly, they needed high quality continuity of training and support for their growing teams.
They presented us with a series of well-crafted training guides and presentation materials, that were originally authored and designed for classroom based training.
Our first challenge was to absorb and understand the complexities of their clinical training and design a way to convert it to Elearning that was engaging, interactive, cohort-based, and accurate. Some of the content was about interviewing new clients and their families. Some of the content was about understanding age-related ailments, such as dementia or osteoporosis, and some of the content was highly technical regarding use of the company’s digital systems and documentation, and collaboration procedures. And of course, some of the content was about healthcare related legal compliance.
You get the picture. It was a lot of content for our team to understand, and then re-build as compelling and effective online learning that would scale for their growing business.
Oh, one more thing. We initially proposed to complete the entire Elearning project in 9 months. They asked if we could do it in 5. We did. And delivered everything right on time.
Our Approach
Working with their subject matter experts and the team who originally designed the classroom based content, we had to redefine the learning objectives – what should the learner be able to DO once they completed each online module?
Our Head of Learning and lead designer Eleanor Guare developed a template for each module for cohesive organization and structure. We wanted to build something that would feel familiar with each course that the learner progressed through.
Then our team of writers and designer team of Eleanor, Kira, Tasha, Victoria, and Shawn worked closely together to design a varied experience within each module, with a consistent host on camera who acted as a guide through the learning process.
All courses included case studies, video learning content, games and interactive activities, applications and ideas for action, knowledge checks and quizzes, and supporting resources and access to additional materials and content for further discovery and learning.
Each course was designed to be about 15-20 minutes in duration, and the entire 13-module course takes about 2.5 hours for a learner to complete. The platform bookmarks your place for ease of access. And everything works on any device, essential for busy care guides and families.
Technology
We shot all of the video in our studios here in Portland, Maine featuring a host who was also a writer and consultant on the project – someone who was familiar with the language and content. Video-based instruction is always more compelling, believable and transferable if the speaker actually knows what they are talking about instead of just reading an unfamiliar script from a teleprompter. Companies we work with often think high quality video content for elearning is unaffordable. It’s not. We create engaging high quality video content right here in our studios, at affordable cost.
Dan and his engineering team integrated video b-roll, on screen text and imagery to reinforce key ideas and points, always showing individuals on screen that reflected the health care workers and their elderly clients and family members.
We constructed some interactive learning content in Storyline 360, and other content we authored in Rise. All content was finished as SCORM files, which we also installed and configured on their Rise Learning Management System.
But What About the Leadership Team?
Before we even finished the course development for the population of Care Guides and front line employees who would be working directly with the families and care recipients, our client asked us to create a learning experience for their managers and team leaders. Since they were growing so fast, our customer wanted to ensure that they provided proper support, learning and practice for the growing management team.
But our client knew about healthcare and social support skills, not leadership skills. Well, this is one of our strengths. Our team has developed and built thousands (yes, thousands) of online courses in the areas of leadership, communication, management, hybrid work environments, innovation and much more. We applied our expertise in those areas to develop a leadership learning experience that integrated both best-in-class leadership practices, and made it contextual and deeply relevant to the people who would be leading these very specific group of health care providers and social workers.
We were able to build this second round of custom course development for the leadership team even faster than the first set of courses. We delivered all courses, finished and installed, in 4 months.
Collaborations with Impact
This is the kind of collaboration we love – working with a client with an urgent and meaningful need, while also making an important difference in our communities.
Now our client can onboard new Care Guides, and support them with detailed, consistent, learning content that reflects the quality and mission of the company. This solution not only scales their talent development process quickly, but also puts the leadership capabilities inplace to support and grow a workforce.
See some of our work for yourself. Take a look at one of our high impact microlearning courses on What to Do When You are Ghosted, and schedule a call with us to discuss your project. Or just send us an email. We’ll get right back to you.
