Organizations across the country stand at the edge of a crucial transition – the complexity and volume of work is ever increasing while staff numbers are diminishing and clients’ demands are higher than ever before.  As such, technology is taking an ever greater role in enabling human service organizations to work at their maximum level of efficiency.  Often, however, technology may create bigger issues with end user acceptance than was originally intended. Without acceptance, an agency that has invested millions in a new technology will have a difficult time rationalizing a complete success.

The largest emerging risk to a technology’s success is not our ability to technically execute, but instead have the client’s personnel thoroughly adopt and use our systems as intended. 

Our new and innovative approach to training has already demonstrated tremendous successes;  successes that highlight the criticality of a properly trained, skilled and supported workforce, coupled with strong performance measures, to demonstrate the success of a system development project.  Our initiative in Texas has  demonstrate that a comparatively small investment in the workforce –  specifically in the area of effective, targeted and innovative training strategies as we will discuss in this presentation –  results in dramatically increased and effective usage of the systems that we build.

Joanne Gallager, Senior Manager, Deloitte Consulting

Joanne Gallagher is a Senior Manager in the Deloitte Consulting Public Sector practice. She specializes in the training strategy and people issues on technology adoption projects. Joanne has been a speaker for a series of national conferences, including the National Child Enforcement Association (NCSEA), American Public Human Services Association (APHSA) and American Association of Motor Vehicle Administrators (AAMVA) relating to training and business transformation, change management and reform in government.  She has led several of strategic initiatives for social service clients in both Canada and the US and her experience with large training initiatives includes the Provinces of Ontario and Alberta , the States of Texas, Florida, Colorado, Michigan Pennsylvania and Massachusetts. Joanne has an Honors Degree in Law and a Bachelors of Arts (Criminology/Psychology) from Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada.

Joanne’s presentation is attached below.  Please note that you have to be logged in to

Clive Shepherd’ short, free course provides subject experts and many others with the skills needed to design engaging, rapid e-learning materials for use in the workplace.  You can go take the course at

http://www.kineolearning.com/60minutemasters/

To motivate, I’ve included my notes from Module 1. 

Module 1 – Preparation “More haste, less speed”

Establishing Goals

• Clarify what you’re trying to achieve. Be absolutely clear about the business goal
• Consider how best to communicate with your audience

Learning Objectives: Spell out in some detail what exactly it is that you want your audience to be able to do differently by the time they have completed using your material. Learning objectives should be measurable–learning objectives that contain active words beat those using thinking words (like ‘know’ or ‘understand’)

Be realistic about what can be achieved both in amount and depth.

Getting to Know your Audience

• Age and Gender
• Prior knowledge of subject – Most critical.
  • What prior knowledge are they likely to have of the subject?
• Preferred ways of learning
• Ability to learn independently
  • How much structure and hand-holding are they going to require?
• Interest and motivation – a key issue. Relevant materials help increase interest and motivation
  • How intered will they be in it

Content Gathering

• Gather all your content
• Review it piece by piece to make sure that it all contributes to the learning objectives
• Be ruthless in removing content that won’t directly help learners achieve these objectives
• Provide support: Explanations, Visual Aids, Examples, and Practical Exercises.

Summary

• What is the business goal?
• What specifically do you need your learners to be able to do when they’ve completed your materials?
• Is it realistic to cover these objectives in a single module? Do you need to break the content into smaller chunks or supplement your materials with other activities and resources?
• What do you know about your audience: their prior knowledge of the subject, their interests and motivation, the extent to which they require hand-holding and structure?
• Does all content that you’re considering including directly support your objectives?

 YouTube and Facebook video will alert consumers about important housing issues

WASHINGTON – The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development announced today that it has produced videos for YouTube (http://www.youtube.com/FHAHUD) and Facebook

http://www.facebook.com/pages/Washington-DC/Federal-Housing-Administration-Department-of-Housing-and-Urban-Development/37437263955

designed to educate Deaf and hard-of-hearing consumers about their fair housing rights, housing counseling services, and loan programs offered by the Federal Housing Administration (FHA)

http://portal.hud.gov/portal/page?_pageid=73,1&_dad=portal&_schema=PORTAL

In one video, a HUD employee uses sign language to tell his story of refinancing his home through FHA, the largest government insurer on mortgages. In another video, he explains that it’s illegal to discriminate in housing based on race, religion, sex, national origin, disability or family status. All videos encourage viewers to contact HUD by visiting its website,

www.hud.gov

for help or more information.