Challenge
The National Park Service (NPS) closed down its learning experience platform on short notice; pre-requisite training for its chainsaw safety program had been overlooked and was not re-purposed for learning management system delivery. With 1.5 weeks until seasonal onboarding, this foundational course, if unavailable, would prevent hundreds of people from becoming qualified to clear trees and trails across all national parks ahead of tourist season. that invited people to explore an electrical trades career at their own place.
My Role
As Senior Instructional Designer for the Stephen T. Mather Training Center, I volunteered to develop an e-learning course to provide the missing pre-requisite to the Chainsaw Safety program.
Action(s)
I extracted legacy content and engaged with subject matter experts to update it, then rapidly developed an engaging and highly visual e-learning course to provide the missing pre-requisite for the Chainsaw Safety program. I developed graphics and interactions, streamlined content, and sourced/embedded photos of underrepresented groups to develop a fully accessible course of 11 lessons with resources in Articulate RISE. I established and tested the course with SCORM files in the learning management system of record and leveraged contacts in Operations, Volunteer, and IT teams to setup course launch for the public (volunteers) on a volunteer training page in NPS.gov. The new course included a set of performance-focused evaluation questions for actionable feedback and auto-generated a personalized certificate of completion.
Result(s)
The revised NCSP Introduction to Chainsaw Operations and Safety course is 508-accessible, visually represents a wider variety of groups and parks, and supports people as the first step in the required NCSP qualification program. The course was launched without any delay for learners on both internal and external (public) platforms and received immediate positive feedback. This helped make the case for exploring a new external LMS solution to deliver NPS training to the public (volunteers and contractors/partners).
Project Link(s): View the Course