eLearning Courses

The company I created these for is an SaaS technology company that is on a mission to democratize access to healthcare by expanding access to surgical training. They create modules in virtual reality that surgeons and medical device companies can access from anywhere using off-the-shelf technology (Meta Quest 2 and Pro headsets).

As their head of learning and development, I was tasked with creating training modules for their ~200 employees. We needed compliance training, specifically around harassment, discrimination and retaliation.

I decided that an eLearning course would be the solution. It allowed employee to take the course when it worked best for them, plus gave them the flexibility to break it up into smaller chunks (and not lose their place) if needed.

As there were two distinct audiences, I designed two versions of the course: One for individual contributors and one for supervisors. The supervisor course contained all of the same content that the employee one did, but also added in additional scenarios that were specific to managing employees and their needs.

They were both very long: 45 minutes for the employee and 1¼ hours for the supervisor course.

I started out by researching sources online about harassment and collating them together. I leveraged the EEOC and the Department of Labor, along with articles from several sources.

Once I had a good base of knowledge, I then leaned on the Compliance and People Operations teams to give me some additional, targeted areas of focus for our organization.

From there, I started creating: The “bones” of the course were designed using Articulate Rise. I incorporated several Storyline blocks that housed scenarios to give employees some additional interactivity and to “bring the material to life.”

I recorded voiceover for the entire course to ensure it met as many people where they were as possible. I record all audio in Audacity, using a Blue Yeti microphone in my recording studio in my basement.

This is one of the courses that I am proudest of. The feedback I received from the people who completed this course was unlike anything I had ever heard or seen before. So many thank yous and compliments - primarily saying how much they appreciated that the content wasn’t dry and that it had items in it that they hadn’t seen from other courses (I ensured there was plenty of timely content in there about microaggressions, gender identity, pronouns and gender expression). They also appreciated the amount of tailoring I had done to the organization: I used scenarios that were true either to the company (with names and identifying details changed), or things that had happened in my life/career. That level of specificity came through and was very much appreciated.

As far as the numbers are concerned: We gave employees three months to complete the course (all of Q1). Of the 200 employees who needed to complete it, 198 of them finished it by the March 31st deadline - and all 200 had started it. The only holdouts were the CEO and an employee who had returned from a leave of absence in mid-March.