The Making of One Project from Start to Finish

How To Write SMART Goals

An Articulate Storyline eLearning course

Tools Used: Articulate Storyline 360, Canva, WellSaid Labs

Click here to view the final version of this course.

Look below to view the making of this course, from its conception to implementation.

Step 1: Analysis

The Problem: An up-and-coming media marketing company, FUSION, noticed that on team projects, goals were not being adequately met or understood across the entire team. Team leaders kept setting unrealistic goals with impossible deadlines, and team members did not have a clear understanding of how their tasks contributed to achieving these goals.

After close scrutiny of the company and its managers, I found the root of the problem to be a lack of clear communication and goal-setting uniformity.

The Solution: To solve this problem, I proposed an eLearning course for all team leaders and team members to take that would walk them through a proven way to set successful goals. This way, the same goal-setting formula can be used across teams company-wide. It will also provide a way to check that goals are realistic, achievable, and clearly communicated to everyone involved.

Step 2: Design

After a successful kickoff meeting with SMEs, I began to organize the process involved to create this eLearning course.

Some of the things I did to provide structure to this project were:

Create a project timeline detailing my duties, client duties, and deadlines
Decide on a course delivery method
Map out the course by topics and subtopics
Estimate seat time for the entirety of the course

Once I had all of these things figured out, I began writing the design doc (see below), which included a business purpose, target audience, training time, any recommendations, expected deliverables, clearly-worded learning objectives, a course outline, and an assessment and evaluation plan.

After design doc approval, I developed the eLearning course storyboard (see below). The storyboard provided even more detail to the course outline, including slide-by-slide narration, descriptions of the design scheme, content chunked according to adult learning theory, module resources, suggested color palette, and more.

Design Doc (Click for full version)

Storyboard (Click for full version)

Step 3: Development

With the storyboard approved, it was time to begin developing the prototype of the course. This course was built in Articulate Storyline 360. It includes several knowledge checks, interactions to hold the user's attention, exciting animations, and an assessment at the end that follows industry best practices.

A script was developed to add narration and truly bring this course to life using the AI voices on WellSaid Labs.

Developing course in Articulate Storyline 360

Script to input narraration into WellSaid Labs
(Click for full version)

This eLearning course went through several phases of review during its creation, including a design proof, alpha, beta, and gold development phases.

Step 4: Implementation & Evaluation

After approval of this course's "gold" and final phase, all deliverables were sent to the client so that the course could be uploaded into FUSION's LMS system.

Using the assessment results and evaluation plan from the design doc, they were able to implement the course and evaluate the target audience after taking the course to ensure company-wide behavior changes and achieve the results they desired.