Challenge

Industrial Medicine Associates (IMA) is responsible for the evaluation of potential disability cases in New York state and has grown to an overwhelmingly dominant position within this market. They had realized that they were expending far too much labor in training new clinicians coming into the organization on how to evaluate individuals for both medical and psychological disabilities. They also sought to streamline training to ensure that a consistent approach was maintained throughout the process for all new employees.

Objectives

DDA felt the best solution was the creation of a new online employee training eLearning platform. This eLearning platform would feature synchronized media including voice-over narration and DDA-designed PowerPoint slides. Quizzes would be incorporated to establish certification of new employee training, with a back-end administrative area that would allow the organization to add new users, edit their information, and review a wide variety of both individual and global metrics describing performance on the tool. Each user would be classified as medical and psychological and would be presented modules featuring materials just for their particular specialty in the organization, with each having access to a shorter module introducing new employees to IMA's corporate culture and work.

Solution

DDA received all materials from IMA and designed a new slide template to ensure that the textual materials presented on the eLearning platform would match the aesthetics of the platform overall and enhance the engagement with users. DDA created a 10-multiple-choice-question quiz at the end of the Medical and Psychological disability evaluation training modules to assess retention of the information conveyed in the materials. The slides and voice-over narration advance at a predetermined rate to ensure that users take the full amount of time to absorb the information; users can revisit previous sections after having initially viewed them through the use of a table of contents on each module and can return to where they left off upon logging in again.

DDA created a login and registration system that allowed IMA to create usernames and passwords for new employees and classify them as medical disability specialists, psychological disability specialists, or both. This system is used to record important metrics on performance on the platform, including whether or not a specific user completed their assigned course, whether or not they passed the quiz that follows, and how long it took to complete the module. Furthermore, global metrics reporting elaborated on how many users were registered with the system, how many of these passed each quiz, how long it took the average user to complete each quiz, and the average score attained on each. The platform also reports on how many people chose wrong answers for each of the quiz questions, allowing IMA to understand how they might improve the employee training in the future. Furthermore, users can be sorted alphabetically and by discipline, helping administrators find the exact information they want quickly and with ease.

The platform was developed with a totally original Virtual eLearning Environment design and graphical user interface courtesy of DDA. Furthermore, the IMA employee training eLearning platform was built from the start to be fully compatible with Android™ and iPad® tablets, helping to keep the training materials accessible to the clinicians that so commonly use these devices. DDA also programmed a unique animated transition to move from slide to slide and also bypassed this transition for segments in which IMA wanted the information to be presented in a step-by-step fashion, with new lines of text appearing over time on the same slide.