Email Safety Training

Project Overview

Audience: Employees at MeSure, a small security company

Responsibilities: Instructional Design, eLearning Development, visual & graphic design

Tools Used: isEazy LMS, Google Suite, YouTube

Project Background

The Problem

This Email Safety eLearning course is a concise, hands-on training designed for employees at a fictitious company called MeSure. In the past few years, the company’s onboarding and eLearning trainings have been rather boring and outdated, with mostly slideshows and lectures. To remedy this and to update their trainings, management at MeSure have requested that the Learning & Development team create several micro-learning trainings to increase engagement and efficiency. One topic they need to cover is email safety.

The Solution

I designed this training on isEazy LMS to stay within the company budget. It’s a 10-15 minute micro-learning training. It could be used as a stand-alone training, part of a series of short trainings on company topics, or as part of the onboarding process for new employees.

Design Process

I designed this training using Adult Learning Theory principles. Since the course is a micro-learning training for busy employees, I focused on chunking, clarity, and authentic activities and assessments. The three learning and design goals were to:

  1. Teach learners the warning signs of phishing as concisely as possible, to aid in chunking and micro-learning.

  2. Provide learners with opportunities for meaningful interaction with the content and to practice using engaging examples and games.

  3. Create an authentic assessment to help learners apply the information and to provide assessment data to the design team and management.

This simple training was designed using Google Documents for outlines, planning, and storyboarding. The content was built directly in isEazy LMS.

Work Samples & Context

Beginning: Course begins with a title page, an interesting statistic about phishing to pique the learner’s interest, and the learning objectives for the training.

Multimedia: A video from Microsoft is included to provide further explanation and examples in a video/audio format.

Content: Definitions and examples are presented in a simple format, with interactive opportunities to read about and practice the content.

Interactivity: During the course, there’s one quiz and one sorting game to help learners practice and apply the content.

Assessment: At the end of course, learners are presented with five email examples. They decide whether each one is a safe or phishing email. This provides real-world practice for learners, serves as a summative assessment, and helps inform the design team on how the training went.

Reflection

Designing this training was an interesting challenge. I chose a free version of isEazy LMS to see what I could do with simple tools that have less bells and whistles. The LMS was easy to use and user-friendly, though the interactive elements took some practice to build. Because this was designed for micro-learning, I had to efficiently describe phishing, write concisely, and cut the “fluff.” I tried to imagine the training through the eyes of a busy employee who only had 10-15 minutes to squeeze in another item on their to-do list.

This project was fun to build! I enjoyed exploring isEazy and building the games and interactive elements. I also enjoyed creating the final assessment. I tried to make it as authentic as possible, and it took some care to find and write the fictional email examples. Overall, I enjoyed the challenges of using a simple LMS, writing concisely, and creating engaging games and practice.