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Implementation is the first time that your target audience makes contact with your course.
Implementation marks the beginning of the actual training, and there are several “target audiences” of learners. There is, of course, the intended audience—the students who need to learn the material. But there is another crucial audience: you and your instructional design team because you’re learning how well your course approach and materials worked. Last, but not least, there’s the audience of shareholders who also have a stake in the effort—your boss, senior executives, the accounting department, and many others.
Implementation can take many forms, depending on the audience and the type of learning you developed.
If you’re implementing an eLearning course, this can involve publishing the course on a learning management system that lets you publicize the course, offer scheduling options, enroll students, track student progress and completion rates, award certificates of completion, and report student data to other parties.
If you’re delivering an instructor-led workshop, you’re going to be working with people who, themselves, will need some level of training so they know how to deliver the course. That probably means (and really should) a train-the-trainer effort.
Implementation might also be as simple as a collection of job aids, peer group discussions, job shadowing, or other non-classroom/non-eLearning efforts.
There are other types of training interventions, so the point is that implementation depends on what you build.
1. Train-the-Trainer (T3): It’s frequently the case that course instructors weren’t involved in the previous phases of course development. That means your team has to train the instructor so that instructors know their roles, know the material cold, and know what the objectives are for the training so that they can constantly adjust their presentation to meet the objectives. They can also be invaluable allies who give feedback on how the early session(s) went and what kinds of modifications might be needed for subsequent sessions.
Instructors should also be provided an instructor guide that lays out, page-by-page, exercise-by-exercise, discussion-by-discussion, how they need to facilitate the material and how they should respond to students.
For example, what media content is included in the course? Videos? Where are the videos? Are the videos on a web platform like Vimeo or YouTube, are they hosted on company servers, or are they going to be located on a flash drive? If they’re on Vimeo or YouTube, will the instructor need to check the URL to make sure the video is still available and at that location?
What kinds of activities have been developed? Discussions? Skill practice (role play)? Games? Each of those activities needs to be discussed in detail with instructors.
What kinds of “checks for understanding” are built into the material? Quizzes? Discussions? Table exercises and report out? What kinds of effort will be by individual students and what kinds will be efforts of groups of learners?
What kind of “final exam” or other efforts will be required? Capstone projects and presentations? A comprehensive final exam? An individual presentation by each student?
The list of instructor tasks can be long, especially for a multi-day course with lots of material and exercises, so a T3 is essential.
2. Assessing and Preparing Learners
Learners must be prepared for what’s coming their way, so we need to make sure they have the required background/baseline knowledge, and are familiar with any tools and processes that will be used in the course. If you’re requiring each student to use software (Excel for spreadsheets?), are they proficient enough to use it for the tasks required?
Are the students aware of the course’s objectives, time commitment, schedule, attendance requirements, and provisions for making up if there’s an absence? How are points awarded for successfully completing various parts of the course? What’s a passing grade or score? Much of that can be provided in the course description and prerequisites, but are you going to assess whether each student really understands the prerequisites and can perform as needed? You don’t want the instructor to be spending extra time with unprepared students.
You should also be prepared to explain how to use any media player software or streaming platform if part or all of the course involves electronic resources.
3. Preparing the environment—for classroom and virtual/hybrid
This kind of “housekeeping” for both instructor-led and virtual or hybrid courses shouldn’t be overlooked.
For classroom:
For virtual, consider the questions below and make the necessary adjustments depending on whether the virtual session will be live-streamed or recorded:
4. eLearning Implementation
Almost another blog post in itself, eLearning implementation needs to essentially be “self-sustaining.” That is, if the student is entirely on their own to find the course, read the description, determine whether they’re qualified to take the course, enroll in the course, launch and “take the course,” etc., then you need to make sure that all of that activity is buttoned up tight.
What should a student do if something doesn’t work correctly? Whom should they contact? Do you have someone dedicated to taking student calls? Does the person taking the call have the technical skills to troubleshoot? Do you have IT staff who can step in if things really go wrong? I once launched a course that had so many unexpected student enrollments that we crashed the server.  We added a second server, and then a third, and crashed those, too. Everything pretty much ground to a halt and students were angry—and so were my bosses who were also getting student calls.
Project Management
Project management is essential for the implementation phase, just as it is for the other phases. Having the kinds of extended punch lists we’ve described in this post can help ensure a successful training effort, and satisfied students, and can prevent tough situations going from bad to worse.
Data collection
Collecting data about student progress, student successes and failures, points awarded for activity completion, and similar measures provide the information you’ll need in the last instructional design phase, Evaluation. At Implementation, begin asking detailed questions about what kind of data needs to be collected and how it will be used.
Being obsessive about tracking and keeping notes about what worked and why, and also what didn’t work and why, will be the kind of information that you’ll need to move into the final stage of your project, Evaluation.
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