Strategies to Empower Deaf & Hard of Hearing Employees in the Workplace

Case Study -- eLearning Sample Course

PROJECT overview

This project was inspired by GoDesignSomething.


This eLearning mini-course is to help support corporate managers at Swanson & Swanson, a medium-sized fictitious medical company in Indiana.  Our Learning & Development team wants to help managers be more inclusive and supportive of differently abled employees in time for Global Accessibility Awareness month.  For one part of this project, we would like to give the mid-level managers some tools to better support their deaf employees (DHH) in contributing to meetings as well as communicating with team members. 

As someone who is hard of hearing, I try to be proactive when it comes to accessibility and inclusiveness.  This topic was engaging for me since some of the situations around co-workers and meetings were derived from personal experience. 

Problem & Analysis

While there have been no complaints, senior managers discovered that their DHH employees only participated 40% as much as their hearing coworkers during meetings & group discussions, and all of them also demonstrated less overall discourse during 1 on 1 meetings

Project goal

In efforts to empower and boost overall engagement from its DHH employees, Swanson & Swanson will incorporate more targeted and easily digestible eLearning modules around inclusiveness and accessibility.  These will include practice opportunities and scenarios for Managers to easily implement into their jobs right away. 

design process

storyboard and design

After gathering research from various existing resources, such as RIT National Institute for the Deaf, and scenarios from existing SME's, I began to draft a flexible Wireframe Outline format using Google Jamboard - a collaborative real-time whiteboard application.  This allowed me to make quick adjustments on the fly. Along with the outline, I drafted Learning Objectives and added those to a basic Instructional Design Document.

These items were submitted to experienced colleagues, and revised before starting to pull up the lesson module structure in Articulate Rise. 


Once the blocks in Articulate Rise were implemented, I began to gather my color palate and design choices to create the Storyboard.  This was built to completion with the goal of being able to hand it off to another Developer if necessary.

Development

The final Rise course was developed in Articulate Rise, incorporating visual self-created assets from Canva as well as stock image resources, such as Pexels, and TEDx for the featured speaker. 

TOOLS USED

Articulate Rise, Canva, Microsoft Word/Powerpoint, Google Jamboard, YouTube, various photo and graphics online resources, as well as Google Drive to host assets.

LEARnings / NEXT STEPS

Participants had praise for the clean design and effective use of colors, as well as the variety of interactive activities within each lesson.  Those in management roles indicating several takeaways that they hadn't though about in their own roles. 

The length also felt appropriate. Almost all mentioned the TEDx speaker and noted the added transcript for DeafHoH to easily read instead of watching entire clip.