Steve Covello

Challenge: The flagship headquarters for the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill (NAMI) in Concord, NH engaged in a corporate partnership with Granite state College (USNH) to adapt their face-to-face training program for suicide prevention into a fully online series of instructional modules accessed through an online payment gateway. The challenge for this project involved collaborating with NAMI NH’s SMEs to produce an online learning experience that was equivalent in both the learning experience and the learning outcomes as had been produced in the face-to-face trainings. Since the NAMI NH executives had no prior experience with producing online training, I was responsible for more than simply producing a product. The project required leadership in the following ways:

• Managing the project within the parameters of the prescribed project plan, budget, and interests of the College.
• Collaborating with a client who was inexperienced in the challenges associated with fully online learning: asynchronous non-cohort based narrative instruction with no live instructor, managing factors that could contribute to learner cognitive overload, anticipating trainees’ widely varying computer literacy.
• Re-writing client submitted script material that was poorly developed.
• Leading conversations about best practice, negotiating compromises, and responding to SME feedback.

The result of this project inspired NAMI NH’s internal re-evaluation and improvement of their face-to-face training based on the narrative design, messaging, and methods of assessment as established by the online training.

Problem: Students were registering for COMM601 with a misunderstanding about the theme and topics covered in it. This resulted in a hardship for students because they had to drop the course and lose a semester’s opportunity to advance their degree. Separately, some students experienced difficulty understanding the concept of the signature term-length project since it was fundamentally different than typical term paper assignments. To address these issues, I created a course trailer that provided a basic overview of the course, its major assignments, and an explanation of what the course does not cover. Details included interactive stopping points where students would “agree” to the key points before they could continue. The EXIT button at the end sent a completion signal to the course LMS so that the instructor could review a completion report. Student responses to the inaugural implementation of this idea has been overwhelmingly positive, and other instructors have requested similar media from me to be used for their courses.