• Client: Philadelphia FIGHT
• Software: Adobe Captivate, Adobe Photoshop, Articulate Storyline and Camtasia Studio
• Categories: eLearning development, instructional design, creative, gamification

This project is a fun eLearning design and development project to educate staff on proper use of email. The IT Department reported several security threats due to employees misue of emails. There were several employees using their work email addresses for personal use, sending extremely personal information using their work email addresses. Some employees' emails were not following certain etiquette rules. In addition, some employees lacked knowledge on basic use of Microsoft Outlook, the official email system for the organization. The result is a series of courses on ccceptable use of the organization's information system. These two courses cover the user of email.

Rather of telling or lecturing about policies and best practices, the course uses storytelling, simulations and gamification elements to immerse employess in exploratory learning. The step-by-step demonstrations on MS Outlook integrate the acceptable use of email policies. The storyline of the content allows learners to assume realistic roles as the communicator via email, identify and face problems with spam and harmful emails, formulate strategies, make decisions, and obtain feedback.

Note: Part 1 of the course series was created in the old 8:6 screen format, while Part 2 uses the newer 16:9 screen format. The reason is that the change from one format to the other ocurred as I was developing the courses.

The branding of the courses signifies the learning path of all the policies and best practices around the use of organizational technology resources. The use of different color schemes serve as affordances to make a distinction between topics within the same subject.

The visual and graphic design of the course make the use of photoshopped slide backgrounds of the organization offices and facilities, providing learners an engaging and relatable visual context.

I used elements of games and storytelling to engage learners and to motivate the adoption of policies and best practices around the use of the email.

I added several knowledge check questions to help learners understand how well they are grasping the content being presented to them. Each question provides positive feedback whether the learner answers the question correctly or incorrectly.

The courses include video demonstrations on using several MS Outlook features that integrate the discussed policies and best practices.