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Getting the right subject matter experts (SMEs) involved is crucial for effective learning experience design. It's pretty obvious: the right experts bridge knowledge gaps and make your training relevant and impactful. On the flip side, failing to engage with SMEs the right way can lead to inaccurate training content, disengaged participants, and ineffective training.
Here’s how I make sure my training hits the mark with SMEs:
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After six months of development, I’m proud to say that the website for our HRSA grant, NP-PD-PDP, is live! Go to pdp.nursing.nyu.edu to check it out. Here's a quick summary of the work involved in creating the site: First, the Principal Investigator (PI) and I worked together to figure out what content to put up. We needed pages that explain the goals of the grant, provide resources, and link to our e-learning courses. After bringing our list of pages and a brief summary of the content, the development team asked me to create some page mock-ups that show how each page would look and feel.
 When I was shopping around for e-learning authoring software, it came down to a contest between Adobe Captivate 9 and Articulate Storyline - two of the e-learning industry’s leading applications. While I was impressed with Articulate, I decided to go with Captivate because it integrates pretty seamlessly with other Adobe applications. I can edit audio with Audition, edit vector graphics with Illustrator, and upload learning modules directly to Captivate Prime, Adobe’s learning management system (LMS).
2016. What a year, huh? Last I wrote, I had just returned from an exciting trip in South Africa where I presented at Ed Tech South Africa. Since then, I led a game design workshop on culturally relevant pedagogy at the 2016 Scratch Conference, my band played our third gig at Sidewalk Cafe, and I transitioned from Online Leadership Program Associate at Global Kids, Inc. to Instructional Design Coordinator at New York University Rory Meyers College of Nursing (Meyers for short). That last one was a big move for me, which means more new experiences and more new challenges are ahead (this seems to be a recurring theme in my blog posts). Here’s a sort of self-ingratiating post about what career move has been like, what I’m working on now, and a few specific things I’ve learned along the way about being an instructional designer at a higher ed institution.  Me posing with Scratch Cat at the 2016 Scratch Conference at MIT.  Photo credit: Anusheh Hashim After an all too short lived month travelling through South Africa as a presenter at the EdTech Summit Africa, I’m back in the United States. Sigh. Travelling is too much fun! Since publishing my previous blog post, the EdTech Summit team and I completed the second half of our journey which took us through Swaziland, Durban, East London, Cape Town, and Pretoria (actually, some of the team continued to Ghana, but I had to return to the States for work obligations) with each location presenting a new set of unique challenges and triumphs. We successfully continued to work through more internet outages and overcame frustrations that sometimes come with training workshop participants who arrive with little-to-no technical proficiency. For now, I’ll reflect on highlights from the rest of the Summit circuit.
 Greetings from Mpumalanga, South Africa! It’s been about two and half weeks since I left New York to embark on a month-long trip through the country to present at the EdTech Summit Africa conference and what a trip it’s been. After spending five fun-filled days of leisure and adventure in Cape Town, I met up with the rest of the EdTech team in Johannesburg where we held our first two summits at Dainfern College (here in South Africa, college sometimes refers to a high school) and Wits University. There, I had the pleasure of running a Scratch workshop for South African educators who were eager and enthusiastic about learning techniques and strategies for incorporating technology and digital media into their classes.
This past Saturday, middle and high school students from all over New York City showcased technology and digital media projects at the 8th Annual Emoti-Con NYC youth conference in the Bartos Forum at the New York Public Library. Attendees participated in networking activities where they had the opportunity to talk to experts in various tech and media fields, listened to inspirational keynote speakers, and presented their work to their peers. This is my third time attending the conference and each year I am more impressed with the innovative ideas and creativity demonstrated by the youth who participate. This year’s conference did not disappoint.  The scene in the NYPL Bartos Forum as students network with experts in tech and media. The aim of every project was to make some sort of social impact in the local or global community. “Badges” were awarded to those whose projects demonstrated most social impact, most innovative, point of view, and most entertaining. Winners include Baruch Campus High School’s VakWay, a prototype of a vacuum cleaner that vacuums subway tracks, ScriptEd’s Styling with the Stars in which users must “dress up” a presidential candidate using a digital tool, and Mouse Design League’s Panda’s Box, a specialized wallet made for disabled persons. Of course, I have to give a special shout out to Global Kids’ Ears Wide Open , a radio podcast produced by middle schoolers from School of Human Rights about combating racism in their school (click here to listen), that won the badge for most social impact! I also need to give another shout out to Global Kids’ #GirlsMatter, a website created by middle schoolers at IS 109 that encourages female empowerment, who won honorable mention!  Pictured right: high school student Jonathan showing his game, "Intruder Alert", that addresses issues of cybersecurity. I find that events like Emoti-Con are so effective in giving youth the chance to demonstrate the work they put into their designs, take ownership of that work, and be rewarded for it. What’s more is that by inviting experts in related fields to speak and network with them, the kids are shown how they can take their designs to the next level and can be applied to “real world” scenarios. As this school year in NYC wraps up, I am excited to see how these kids will continue to reveal their creative minds through the ingenious tech and media designs that they produce. |
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