PowerPoint - Instructor-Led Course (Update and Refresh)

Working as a Training Development Officer with Emergency Management Ontario (EMO), I led the content update and visual refresh of the province of Ontario's Community Emergency Management Coordinator course (EM 300 CEMC), an instructor-led course conducted both in-classroom and virtually.

According to Bloom’s Taxonomy, this course addresses both concrete and abstract knowledge as well as all six of the cognitive processes (remember, understand, apply, analyze, evaluate, create) wherein learners would be equipped to act as CEMCs for an Ontario municipality. As this was not a new course, the focus was on enhancing rather than creating. This course was originally designed to be Instructor-Led Training (ILT), but the COVID-19 pandemic necessitated that it also be delivered virtually (VILT). This update included that consideration.

I worked with emergency management subject matter experts (SMEs) to identify what information was outdated or missing, and to explore any ideas they had for information they felt should be added to improve the quality of the course, within the scope of the project. Beyond a certain threshold, changes were documented and tabled for a future iteration of the course, when it would be redesigned.

The visual design of the course was refreshed to match current ministry branding and the slides were edited to be consistent with each other and more easily readable. Many slides were overloaded with text, and/or the text was too small to be readable from a distance, so my team and I either added slides or redesigned them to ensure only essential information was on the screen (adhering to Mayer’s coherence principle) and to include more meaningful visuals (images, animations, and videos) to emphasize key points and help learners integrate the information more effectively (Mayer’s multimedia and signalling principles). In some cases, text was completely replaced on the slides by graphics (see samples below) as the information would be delivered verbally (Mayer's redundancy principle).

Though this was a course update, not a new design, an iterative approach was still taken. SMEs and other stakeholders were consulted throughout the process and presented with an initial draft of the finished course update for their feedback and evaluation. This feedback was used to make further improvements before uploading the course to EMO’s learning management system (LMS) for delivery. Instructors were then able to give their feedback after delivering the course and that feedback was recorded for future iterations of the course.