Storyline Course: PBT Scoresheet Training

Challenge:

Pittsburgh Bar Trivia is a local bar trivia company looking to improve its new host training offerings. Because the hosts act as subcontractors for the company, which is a small business and home based, the owners do not have an "onboarding" program or a location in which to centralize training.

Current training offerings have been distributed by the trainer/owner through Google Drive sharing of screen capture narrated videos. The owners were hoping to have a more interactive way to train hosts on how to use the scoresheet hosts use to score trivia games. Currently, new hosts only get to practice these skills during on the job training or by just playing around with a copy of the scoresheet.

The ownership felt a software simulation type training would be most effective for this project.

Solution:

First, I learned about the company, its offerings, and its current means of providing training to its hosts. From there, I was able to identify that a simulation would be a great way to allow new hosts to practice scoring a game in a way in which they could receive guidance and go back for any questions/refreshers as needed. I also learned how to operate the scoresheet and score a game.

Next, I completed a course planning blueprint in which I was able to identify key learning outcomes and performance goals that the training needed to address. I shared these learning outcomes with the stakeholders (ownership) and got approval to move on.

After that, I created a simple task-analysis document inside of Google Drive in which I broke down each step of scoring a trivia game using the company's current score sheet. This outline served to help me delineate sections of the training and steps that needed to be covered within each section.

Then, it was on to development. The simulation was developed with Articulate Storyline 360. I used the record screen feature to film myself showing the various features of the scoresheet that I was trying to explain to the new host learners. I then had the screen recording uploaded as steps in a view mode in which I could use the caption boxes to explain where to click and what to do in each step. Then, I broke the same video into a try it mode, where users had to enter or click on the scoresheet in the correct locations to learn about each section of the scoresheet. I customized the feedback for each slide.

For some parts of using the scoresheet, like determining winners, I had to create my own quiz questions (since the goal of the section was not a visible or clickable task). I also created a completion certificate for the course. Finally, I added a course menu so that learners could view one section of the course at a time without having to view the entire course. This was determined to be a helpful feature in my talks with ownership because sometimes the hosts forget or do not complete one or two sections of the scoring correctly, but would not need the entire training course to answer their questions or fix their mistakes.

The last step involved a lot of feedback and debugging. I went through the course slide by slide testing each button. I fixed anything that was broken and improved things that were not appearing in a visually pleasing manner. I added some additional navigation buttons to improve the user experience, and changed the player settings to allow the learner to have control of the course navigation. This was important to the owners, who did not want their learners to feel stuck in the course if they were ready to move on.

The course was published using Google Cloud hosting and shared with the client.

Result:

This course will be successful if:

1. The owners are able to implement it easily and efficiently within their current hiring practices. The course needs to be accessible to the new hosts and easy for them to share.

2. The learners find the program to be accessible and easy to use. In this case, since many hosts are doing this job to supplement a full-time job, the training needs to be easy and not overwhelming.

3. Hosts achieve all learning outcomes: Are able to score each component of a game with no errors. This can be gauged by having the ownership or more experienced hosts observe a new host in scoring a game. To view data about how helpful this training is in achieving these learning outcomes, it would be best to observe hosts trying to score a trivia game before taking the training and then after so that improvement could be witnessed, noted, and measured.