Rising Above Limitations: Stories of Creative Maneuvering in Learning Design

In my decade of Learning Design, I haven't yet been on a project where I was given infinite time, money, and resources. In fact, most of the projects I have worked on have been the opposite - with severe constraints on on all three as well as other complications.

A good learning designer adapts to limitations if they want to survive in the job. While an exceptional learning designer strategically and creatively navigates these limitations to thrive.

Below are two stories of times that we worked creatively within heavy limitations to create a highly successful product.

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Delivering Global Impact with Limited Time

Part of one of our projects was to create virtual instructor-led training sessions on the rollout of a new tool. It seems simple in short, but in practice it had many limitations:

Limitation 1: Complicated Subject Matter

The tool had many complicated, nuanced features. Instructors could be trained to teach a specific script, but would have needed time to learn the tool enough to address nuance for this audience. Unfortunately there, was the following barrier.

Limitation 2: A fast timeline

The timeline given to us for this project was at breakneck speed. Training needed to be released extremely quickly after the tool was completed. There was no adequate time to train the trainer.

Limitation 3: A large, worldwide audience

Training needed to be delivered to thousands of people spread out across the world. This means we were facing language and timezone barriers.

Our Solution

We didn't have time to train facilitators on this complicated tool, but what we did have was a pool of people who had been involved in the user testing for this tool. These people had seen the tool in several iterations and had been testing it extensively over the months. They already had knowledge of that tool. They came from every worldwide region. They were our best hope for delivering top-tier content.

Photo by Yan Krukau

Every learning designer knows that using volunteer subject matter experts to facilitate sessions is risky. They may know the content, but can they smoothly follow an outline for a training session? Can they speak to the audience in a clear and engaging way? Can they manage disruptions? Often, the answer is no.

What little time we had on this section of the project was spent carefully screening for these volunteer facilitators. From the pool of user testers, we had to pick out people with the natural characteristics we needed. We screened for people with the charisma to be engaging, a strong personality to manage a group, and the ability to be able to catch on quickly to the training outline we had created. Lastly, we needed a range of people who could represent the varying languages and timezones.

The Results

This wouldn't be in our story of overcoming limitations if the results were not a roaring success. Spending our precious little time to be picky about finding the right volunteers to facilitate was the right call in this case. The facilitators were fantastic, the reviews were extremely positive, and everyone around the world had a chance to learn from an expert.

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Frequent Changes, Few Resources, Varying Content Relevance

Another project of ours involved creating step-by-step instructions for a program. However we faced many short-term and long-term challenges.

Limitation 1: Frequent Changes

Despite the need for comprehensive instructions, the content was expected to be changing frequently, especially in the first few months as the program rolled out and they made updates based on feedback.

Limitation 2: Varying Content Relevance

The content needed to be delivered to a variety of roles. Each of these roles had varying degrees of relevance to the content. Some of the instructions would be applicable to everyone and some of the instructions would be applicable only to specific roles.

Limitation 3: Limited Resources

The client did not have many people who could give us the content or tell us when the content would change. The people they could offer us had extremely limited availability because they were in high-demand elsewhere in the project.

Our Solution

We had two goals in order to give the client the best outcomes possible:

Solution 1: We become the subject matter experts

It became clear to all that with the limited resources and frequent changes, our only hope was to become the subject matter experts ourselves. We taught ourselves the program and plugged ourselves into developer meetings and subject matter expert communities to proactively keep on top of any and all updates.

Solution 2: Dynamic instructions

We wrote all instructions into a single core directory. We then created pages in the knowledge base for each role and programed them to pull in content from the core directory that was relevant to that role. Because of this, we only had to update the content in a single place and, through careful planning and programming, each role-specific page would be updated with the new content automatically.

Bonus: We were able to offer text and video instructions

Because we became the subject matter experts and programed the instructions to be so efficient, we had enough time to not only write and maintain the step-by-step instructions, but provide a video tutorial for each function as well.

The Results

Two months post-launch:

• The instructional videos were played (not just viewed, but played) 5,540 times.

• The videos had an average rating of 4.9/5.

• Knowledge base pages were viewed 7,022 times.

• We received high anecdotal praise, including an observation that this solution should be the gold standard for all of the department's future tool migrations.

For this client, these numbers signified that the materials were a massive success.