Computer Museum of America (CMoA) opened in July of 2019. The museum has less than 10 FTE’s and a few part time workers. The environment of this business, given the staffing, is not unlike a tech startup where everyone wears multiple hats. The Visitor and Volunteer Services Manager started with the museum in the summer of 2022. As part of her job responsibilities, she is building out a group of volunteers who help run the musuem. Her challenge in doing this is that there is no standard orientation for volunteers at CMoA.

We conducted this project in a systematic way by beginning with analysis and used the ISPI Human Performance Technology Model to guide us. Specifically, we conducted a training requirements analysis, learner and environment analysis, and a content analysis. Reviewing this with the client codified the specific aspects of the problem and allowed us to proceed in a systemic manner. You can read more in the documents and sections below.

Before any performance intervention, the current state or problem was that the existing method of onboarding volunteers was disorganized and required everyone to be in the room at the same time. This caused issues because it is not easy to get busy adults, who are kind enough to volunteer their time, in the room synchronously. Importantly, we learned that previous attempts of going through a text heavy PowerPoint orientation scared off new volunteers. The analysis we conducted throughout this project led us to the solution we ended up implementing: an asynchronous option for onboarding volunteers at CMoA.

As part of determining that an asynchronous training option was appropriate, we first conducted a training requirements analysis, learner and environment analysis, and content analysis to determine why training was needed, what content our training needed to cover, who it would be covered for, and the desired outcomes from our intervention.

There is more to read in the full document, but, to summarize our key findings.

1. We determined that training was an appropriate path to solving the problem we identified . This problem was a lack of consistency or standards in the information being shared at the start of the volunteer’s employment. Changing the knowledge of employee’s was identified as the primary goal.

2. Learners hold many different positions and schedules. Additionally, they are a diverse audience who are computer literate.

3. The museum has clearly defined subject matter on what should be shared with employees, they were just lacking a way to share it. You could picture the client as a rich oil field missing the pipeline for distribution.

Overall, these analyses helped us confirm that e-learning was the proper choice for this intervention.

You can see the full document below (1).

We scoped our original project to focus on new employees and volunteers, but given the fact that few employees are onboarded every year, we designed a lesson plan, with the help of management at the museum, that focused only on volunteers. Multiple interviews were conducted with CMoA leadership to vet this lesson plan to ensure it was aligned with their strategic goals. This represented an area where we were flexible to the clients needs as we originally anticipated tackling employee and volunteer onboarding.

Our primary source material for developing the lesson plan was an existing employee onboarding handbook and interviews with museum SMEs. We agreed on e-learning as the desired intervention given the need for developing an intervention that was available asynchronously and the tech savviness of the intended audience. Here, however, we hit a wrinkle as e-learning can get quite expensive and given the non-profit nature of the client, money was tight. There was no budget for any new tools or ongoing maintenance, so we decided with management that our intervention could be hosted on a free website that could be incorporated into their existing site later. This would ensure the longevity and usability of the intervention for the customer.

In designing the lesson plan for our website and the content on it, we primarily used Keller’s ARCs model, Cognitive Load Theory, and Mayer’s Principles of Multimedia Learning.

You can see the full document below (2).

As stated in the design section, cost was a concern for this project and it was not feasible for our non-profit museum sponsor to purchase technology to support this onboarding experience. We created our instructional materials in a way that centered around using a Wordpress site as the medium, since their existing site was built on Wordpress, which would make portability easier down the road for the client.

Videos, photos, and job aids were setup by our team on this website to support the onboarding journey in an easy, coherent, and engaging manner.

You can see the website below (3).

Overall, the client was exceedingly happy with the end products we delivered. This project did not continue into a formal evaluation phase, given the time constraints, so unfortunately, this is the only summative result available. We did conduct a formative evaluation as we went along the process; you could think of this as checking the cookies while you’re baking them if you’re not familiar with instructional design. Along the way, this formative evaluation led us to focus on only volunteers as the audience, which was a key change, and additionally steered us towards choosing a website for the intervention.

Given more time, we would have liked to have conducted a more thorough summative evaluation of this intervention in continuing with the ISPI Human Performance Technology Model we followed through this project. This would have likely looked like us surveying and interviewing new and existing employees alike to get their feedback as well as tracking overall changes in the results of onboarding before our intervention and after.