In my Instructional Design Assistant position with the University of Colorado Denver, I’ve been working on building a collection of eleven courses for the Colorado Office of Employment First (COEF). These courses are focused on Individual Placement & Support, guiding employment specialists on how to help mentally disabled adults obtain equitable employment. Part of my group’s project with COEF involves some flipped model training, similar to how they’ll use their own training. First, learners will access and review online, self-paced courses, followed by a live facilitated session afterwards. Previously, my group has created training and facilitated resources on design basics, and accessibility. As COEF will be using my eleven courses as prototypes for their future courses which they’ll build themselves, they’d like to be knowledgeable on how to build courses in the Thinkific learning management system (LMS). Thus, I created a training course in Thinkific with information on C.A.R.P. design guidelines, as well as some informal walkthrough videos on the LMS. Please visit my self-paced course called, Thinkific LMS Foundations. You may also find more information about the course's design on my Portfolio page, Courses. And, on January 12, 2021, I facilitated the training live for the COEF trainer staff.
This was a great opportunity to fine tune my training through the flipped model, also. COEF trainers were able to take my self-paced course on Thinkific LMS foundations in the actual Thinkific LMS, too. When myself, and the COEF trainer staff were able to sit down and discuss the Thinkific LMS together, a lot of natural discussion followed. We even were able to walk through some of the COEF trainer's current PowerPoint slides and determine if they followed C.A.R.P. guidelines or not for real-time feedback. Resources within the self-paced course were given with learner agency in mind. Multiple resources in various formats (e.g., videos, articles, blogs, graphics) allowed the COEF trainers to explore and follow their interests rather than having numbered, required assignments.
We received positive feedback on the Thinkific LMS Foundations course and live training with the feedback that I’m most proud of being that COEF trainers were discussing the training and C.A.R.P. guidelines freely in their own internal meetings that week. Not only were COEF trainer staff discussing my training, but they were teaching their colleagues who had missed the training! This is the best type of flattery in teaching when learners are so passionate about your topic that they’re openly discussing it and teaching their peers. I look forward to hopefully similar experiences in my future facilitations.
References
Ball, J. (2018, April 29). CARP design principles [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qAqtRsU01sI&feature=youtu.be
Models of ‘flipped’ facilitation. (2020, July 7). Federation University. https://federation.edu.au/staff/learning-and-teaching/elearning-hub/flipped-classrooms