ADMISSIONS COMMITTEE TRAINING

Challenge:

In their busy lives, Admissions Committee members often employ inefficient methods for managing their weekly volunteer work. They lack systems for keeping track of their assigned applications for review and subsequently create backlogs when they forget to complete their weekly assignments. They also have difficulty remembering the subjective criteria for rating the applicants’ essays, leading to inconsistent scoring. To get back on track, they often reach out to the founder/CEO for help, which takes him away from his executive-level work.

Solution:

The founder/CEO first asked for an online, self-paced replacement for his orientation presentation on The Ripple Center and the work of the Admissions Committee. I explained how true eLearning that incorporates Merrill’s Five Principles of Learning would lead to greater engagement and better integration, and he agreed. Consequently, I designed demonstrations and applications of the specific skills needed to manage the Admissions Committee's weekly work. In my research, though, I also discovered that the committee had no training for evaluating applicants’ essays and fit for the Fellowship. The data from previous years actually reflected significant differences in how committee members applied the subjective evaluation criteria. Therefore, I researched a variety of methods for consistent and efficient evaluation work and created authentic exercises for the learners to apply these skills. Finally, to overcome a preference against eLearning expressed by some committee members, I designed a cartoon avatar of the founder/CEO himself, speaking in his distinctive voice, to deliver the training through both comic-style narration and animated videos. The learner feels like they are in his world, rather than simply clicking through a series of static pages of virtual training.