I began my instructional design career in the classroom, as a GED instructor. Later I moved into corporate training where working with groups of 20, 30, 40, 100, 250 people in a room was the norm. I thrived on the energy in the room. The more people, the merrier!
Several years ago I was asked to take on a project that involved one-on-one instruction. There was no group on whose energy I could feed. There were no opportunities for small or large group discussion… not even opportunities for a pair-share! It made me uncomfortable. In the end, I didn’t do a very good job designing the program. Recently, I made a discovery.
Over the past few months, my teammate and I have cranked out several multi-week, self-guided/self-paced training programs. Each of these programs is loaded with content, and learners are challenged to demonstrate their mastery of the content through a variety of online assessments and in-person role plays with a training mentor.
The issue we were running in to, however, is that the training mentors were busy people. How were they supposed to know the pace of progress of the learners, and how were they supposed to track whether the learners were even completing all of the assessments?
We came up with a simple progress tracker (see image below).
This is a tool that training mentors can use to check in with the learners on a regular basis, track their progress and answer any questions. It also helps training mentors to know when they need to prepare role play scenarios and other assessment-based interactions with the learners.
You can download a blank form here, feel free to modify it for your own purposes.
What are some of the practices you’ve found to be most effective when designing and delivering one-on-one and/or self-paced training programs?
