INSTRUCTIONAL DESIGN
An instructional design project working with a real-world, local, not-for-profit organization to assists in training their employees and volunteers on the proper storage of 100% High-risk allergen products in a warehouse. The project used the Learning and Performance Support (LeaPS) ID model to produce a job-aid, performance assessment instrument, and instructor guide for the client.
The Client
Front and center to any instructional design project is the client themself. At the end of the day, the client deserves a performance improvement product that incorporates evidence-based solutions to meet their needs. Our client was the Idaho Foodbank.
The Idaho Foodbank was established in 1984 and since that time has distributed millions of pounds of food through its facilities in Lewiston, Meridian and Pocatello. In fiscal year 2021, The Foodbank provided food for nearly 26 million meals to Idahoans living with food insecurity. The Foodbank distributes food through a network of more than 465 partners including schools, food pantries, senior centers, feeding sites, shelters, mobile pantries and churches. Recognizing the crucial connection between hunger and health, The Idaho Foodbank focuses on providing nutritious food and collaborates with community organizations to promote nutrition education, wellness tools and healthy living.
The Idaho Foodbank's Mission is to help feed, educate and advocate for Idaho’s hungry through collaborative partnerships to develop efficient solutions that strengthen individuals, families and communities.
The Team
Our Team was comprised of four Master's of Science Students from Boise State University enrolled in the Organizational Performance and Workplace Learning (OPWL) program. We were spread across four stats and three time-zones (including the client's time zone). We utilized Zoom for client and team meetings while maximizing the use of google drive through Boise State for our file collaboration and sharing medium.
This project was the culminating project for OPWL 537 - Instructional Design.
The Performance Improvement Problem
The client stated that her mostly volunteer force was expected to understand the risk of 100% high-risk allergens, be capable of identifying products containing those allergens and ensuring that necessary precautions were taken when storing and cleaning up 100% high-risk allergens in their storage warehouse.
Goals
Employees and volunteers:
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Identify and label 100% high risk allergen products (milk, eggs, soy, wheat, peanuts, tree nuts, fish, and shellfish)
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Prevent cross-contact of allergen foods with other foods
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Properly clean and sanitize spills of allergenic foods
The Approach
Our team utilized the Learning and Performance Support (LeaPS) Instructional Design Model throughout this project to give us a systematic approach to meeting our client's needs.
Empathize & Analyze
Client & SME Interviews
Our ID team conducted several interviews in order to fully understand a few different aspects of our project.
Prior to each meeting with our client the team would virtually meet in order to review the meeting outline and ensure our inputs were included or discussed to meet project deadlines. By incorporating these team administrative functions prior to our client meetings, we ensured efficient use of everyone's time.
The design for our client meetings included a lead consultant that ensured our team accomplished the goal of the meeting and managed both our team's time and our client's time. Feedback from our client suggested that they understood who was running the meeting and was not confused on any pacing or content throughout the meetings.
Meeting 1 - Client and ID Team Introduction (Empathize & Analyze)
This meeting was designed to simply introduce our team to the client and get a basic understanding of the company we were working with and an introduction to their performance improvement need.
It was during this meeting that we first learned about the problem set we were facing while also underning about the organization and culture we were going to be dealing with.
Meeting 2 - Learner Analysis (Empathize & Analyze)
We followed our introduction meeting 1-week later with our learner analysis meeting. The goal here was to get an idea of who our audience would be as far as learners and instructors for our project. This meeting afforded us the opportunity to learn a lot of demographics about our client's employees.
What we discovered was that all of our learners were current employees all over 18 years old with a varying age from 18 to 65+. All learners spoke fluent English. Some of our learners had prior experience, but the majority had no experience with allergen control. Employees were mostly men and were receptive to further training on our subject.
Meeting 3 - Training Requirements Analysis (Empathize & Analyze)
The purpose of this meeting was to determine the type of training configuration that we would need to design in order to meet the client's needs. Our team concluded that a Job-Aid would be the most appropriate way to meet our client's performance gap due.
This determination was used based on a post-meeting analysis by the team that determined our client required leaners to:
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Access and use the information in real-time
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Data was not necessary to store in long-term memory but could be accessed at the time of the event. (e.g. bin tag marked product as "100% high-risk allergen contained inside")
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Volunteers would be short on time to train extensively on the subject and would not perform it on a daily basis (reduced access to memory)
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Have visual reminders of what high-risk allergens were (stimuli)
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Have access to instructions they could follow when stimuli was encountered (responses)
(Instructional Design Course Handbook (4rd edition))
Design and Develop
Following meeting 3 with our client, the ID team conducted several internal meetings in order to verify the scope and potential solutions to the problem set. Utilizing a completely iterative process of data collection, document review, and job aid research that Idaho Foodbank was already using, our team set out to draft, develop, and internally prototype solutions for our client and SME.
By doing this internally as a team we were able to identify and debrief a lot of issues early to only present our client with decision points that we could not come to a consensus on or could not find information on as a team.
Again, this was to consistently be cognizant of both our client's time and our team's time throughout the project life cycle to build trust and understanding
Task Analysis
Our detailed task analysis can be found here. We presented this to the client in order to confirm that the tasks required to be on the job aid were reflected. In addition, we identified the critical tasks with the SME and ensured they were incorporated into the final job-aid.
Job Aids
Our Team ended up producing three job aids for the client. Two of them are meant to be carried in an employee handbook of some sort and the third one is meant to be placed in storage areas as a visual cue on storage requirements for high-risk allergen products.
Implement and Evaluate
Following approval from our client on the draft job aids and the final task analysis our team set out to ensure that the ID project had the potential to incorporate future training updates as well as evaluations. By doing this we ensured that the client had a way to implement formal, detailed performance improvement training, if desired, in the future.
This step also allowed our team to take an additional look at our job aids to ensure that the critical areas identified in our training requirements and task analysis were incorporated appropriately throughout all of our products.
Normally we would have created an instructional guide that would assist a future trainer in designing a course of instruction around the topic. In addition to that instructional guide, we would also create a performance assessment instrument that would guide a future evaluator through appropriate setup, demonstration, and evaluation of the learner for the specified task or tasks.
In lieu of creating two separate documents and in consultation with our client (once again taking their precious time into consideration) we opted to "mash-up" the instructor guide and performance assessment instrument. Our intent was simple; the task is straight forward, and the instruction would mainly be centered around how and when to use the job aid.
The final performance assessment instrument mash-up can be found here as one of the final deliverables to our client.
Alterations (In true engineering fashion, we didn't follow the prescribed process)
References
Organizational Performance and Workplace Learning Boise State University. (2019). Instructional design course handbook. Boise, ID: Boise State University College of Engineering.