Harrison Hartley – Instructional Designer

I had been asked to add a certain training from an outside agency to our internal LMS for compliance purposes. One of our C-Suite personnel said the training was contingent on us staying certified for a specific protocol. I responded back a day later by saying “Hey, update from me, I finished the training and got the certificate to prove it! Here’s my technical details” to which the C-Suite person replied “Why would you do that to yourself?!” in a half-joking matter.

While definitely meant in jest, it got me thinking about a previous interaction where my boss asked me to buy some third-party created content. Long story short, it came down to two options, one was cheaper and easily purchasable, the other was more expensive and not as readily available. The first option would have been the easy path but there was one problem. I didn’t think it was good. I could sense the annoyance of my boss as I told them outright “I don’t think option A is well put-together”. 

During my time in undergrad, I had the fortune of taking numerous philosophy classes, one class shy of being able to officially minor in it. One of the classes was possibly the hardest class I had ever taken in my life, nicknamed “Philosophy Bootcamp” by the students. We studied David Hume’s “A Treatise of Human Nature” and my professor broke down one of the arguments which paraphrased could be summed up as “When you start treating people as numbers and stop treating them as humans, bad things happen.”

There is definite irony I feel whenever I pull a report from the LMS platform and see the employee ID numbers appear before their first or last names, or when we talk about the amount of users completed vs. not completed. It comes down to a need for flexibility and just not having enough time in the day, but I stand by my philosophy of “I want to take the same training the learners do”. I shudder to think the amount of content may have been posted for a workforce of hundreds, if not thousands of employees to take without the person who takes the responsibility of Instructional Design knowing exactly what’s in the module.

There may come a time where I just physically do not have enough time to take every single training we’re importing into the platform, but for now I will earnestly try to get eyes on everything I’m going to ask (or make) my learners undertake.