Certificate Program Project

Webistia Case Study and Prototype

This spring I participated in the Instructional Design Certificate Program from the eLearning Designer's Academy, taught by Tim Slade.

Our project for the course involved Webistia, a fictitious web services company experiencing some issues with its customer support team. Over the eight weeks of the course we practiced an instructional design project from start to finish. This included navigating stakeholder conversations, conducting a needs analysis, and making decisions about what training modalities (if any!) were best to solve the problems.

The situation was that a stakeholder had two problems to solve:

• The support call center was seeing declining customer satisfaction scores.
• Sales of the Webistia Pro product through that channel were also declining.

The stakeholder asked for two eLearning courses for all of the company's support agents, but further investigation suggested that the problems were more narrowly focused and the causes were a mix of training, management, and motivation that wouldn't be solved with eLearning courses alone. My solution came in three parts:

• An eLearning course for new hires and underperforming agents, which would give them a more formal background in the company's customer service standards, as well as an opportunity to practice simulated call scenarios.
• An instructor-led online workshop for managers, so new managers can learn from their more experienced peers as well as receiving formal instruction from the facilitator.
• An online knowledge base for product information, providing an easy resource for agents on calls with customers to get the answers they need.

In addition to working through the course workbook, I built a prototype for the interactive simulation part of the eLearning course using Claude Design. If I were building the course for real I'd have videos and explainers beforehand, and the “callers” would have full audio rather than just text transcripts. It's also just got Claude's placeholder copy for now, which is actually not too bad, but my next step would likely be to build out the caller scenarios and learner responses myself.

Try eLearning Simulation Prototype Read Case Study Workbook (5.4 MB PDF)