A Nurse's Guide to Soft Skills

The Nurse's Guide to Soft Skills includes five interactive eLearning courses that help nurses provide a better patient experience.

• Responsibilities: Instructional Design, eLearning Development, Graphic Design
• Target Audience: Nurses in the state of Texas
• Tools Used: Storyline 3, Illustrator
• Budget: Medium to High
• Year: 2018

The director of a university's public-facing training divison reached out to me to make their level-1 eLearning courses more interactive and engaging. They planned to deliver these courses to nurses in medical facilities throughout the state of Texas.

I agreed to use the existing content to build a more engaging eLearning experience, but I also proposed developing an immersive branching scenario at the end of each course. I explained that this would help the nurses practice their new skills by making realistic choices in a low-risk environment. The client was on board with my proposal, so we signed the paperwork and I got started.

Process

I worked through this project by designing and developing one course at a time. In all, there were five courses:

1. Effecitve Communication
2. Emotional Intelligence
3. Critical Thinking
4. Teamwork
5. Fostering Diversity

By leveraging their existing content, Subject Matter Experts (SMEs), and nurses, I used a rapid prototyping approach to build all five courses.

Instructional Design

Since the content already existed in a basic format, I worked with the SME (a case manager with decades of nursing experience) to reverse-engineer the learning outcomes.

We considered which actions the nurses were expected to perform on the job, and then we considered how the existing content would help the nurses perform as desired. This left us with a collection of measurable, meaningful learning objectives for each course.

I used these objectives to guide my ensuing content design decisions. I cut content that did not contribute to objectives, and I did additional research to build out content that had gaps in it.

From there, I chunked and structured the content to ensure that it was logically organized and easy to understand.

Making the Content More Engaging

Once the core content was in good shape, I began considering how to make it more interactive and engaging.

From this point on, I used a rapid prototyping approach. I built the content directly in Storyline, then I showed it to the SME, client, and members of the target audience for review, feedback, and refinement.

I implemented the personalization principle by introducing a "mentor" character who guides the user through the content and introduces them to scenario at the end.

Building on this, I created an attention-grabbing interaction at the beginning of the course: a screen where the user could choose their mentor. Choices like this are shown to increase engagement and learning.

Keeping in line with the personalization principle, I made sure that the mentor always used a conversational tone.

From here, I introduced choice and interactivity everywhere that it made sense to do so. Research shows that learner freedom contributes to learning and engagement, and I wanted to leverage as many research-backed principles of engagement as possible.

This approach worked well since I had already chunked the content. It was just a matter of letting the learner choose which chunks to explore (and in which order).

Building the Branching Scenario

The branching scenarios at the end of each course are the highlights of this project.

I designed each branching scenario by hosting a 1-2 hour meeting with the SME.

I led the meeting by helping the SME identify a scenario where the nurse would have to use the skills learned from the course's core content. Then I asked, step-by-step, what the appropriate way to work through the scenario would be.

After identifying the ideal path through the scenario, we discussed what wrong choices people may make, why they may make those choices, and what consequences would be associated with those choices.

Since the SME had so much experience in the field, they were able to provide rich scenarios with nuanced approaches and realistic consequences. We identified best choice, okay choices, and objectively bad choices for each decision point.

I used my notes from this meeting to rapidly prototype and build the branching scenario in Articulate Storyline. This was possible because the client was confident in my approach and the SME provided exceptional real-world content.

Each branching scenario had multiple endings depending on the user's performance. Also, when the user selected an "okay" response, we gave them a chance to get back on track. If the user selected one of the worst responses, we presented them with some additional feedback and a "Try Again" button to get brought back to an earlier point in the scenario.

This "choose-your-own-adventure" approach was well-received by the client and the nurses in our pilot groups.

Results

The client and participants loved the end-product. The new, highly interactive content portions of each course were a night-and-day improvement compared to what they were initially, and the branching scenarios were praised by everyone who experienced them.

The courses were rolled out to hospitals and doctor's officers across the state of Texas. They have helped many nurses provide better patient experiences (as evinced by the patient survey responses).

Takeaways

Working on this project taught me how powerful branching scenarios could be when paired with an expert practitioner with rich experience to draw on. They are an excellent tool for engaging users and improving real-world performance.

Going forward, I am always looking out for soft skills projects that have the budget and expertise available for us to use this approach.