The Introduction to Soft Skills e-learning course is aimed at apprentices and individuals entering the workplace for the first time. During my time as an assessor, I noticed that the young people I would visit possessed good IT skills, but lacked soft skills. Below are some screenshots taken from various areas of the course.
Planning and Development
I created this course after leaving my assessor role, however, I was still working alongside apprentices. There are lots of soft skills I could have focused on for this course, so to whittle down the topic list I created a survey. The survey was sent to employees at my workplace and was aimed at apprentices and managers. The survey asked the employees what they thought were the most important soft skills to possess. Out of a selection of 10 soft skill areas, the following scored the most:
- Work ethic, attitude and positivity
- Communication
- Time management
- Teamwork
Work ethic, attitude and positivity were originally separate skill areas, but as they all scored high, I grouped them together as they are very similar in topic. I had a three-month deadline to create this course, it was a blended learning course which included tutor-marked assignments (TMA’s).
The planning phase took a long time, the content had to be written from scratch and a new design needed to be storyboarded. The course was split up into 4 e-learning units, and compromised of a course outline, e-learning units (learning), quiz (self-assessment) and an assignment (summative assessment). Before writing the content the learning objectives were created, these were then used to plan what content would be included in the course.
The content was developed using a range of reference sources including Tulgan’s Bridging the Soft Skills Gap, personal experience and the Skills you Need website.
For this type of course, I decided to include scenarios – situations that a young apprentice could relate to. The learner would then be presented with a situation and asked to provide an answer. The assignments were then created and designed around the learning objectives. Learners would need to put their skills to use and show what they had learnt from the course.
After the objectives and content were written, it was time to create the storyboard and design.
Writing Style
I used readable.io to ensure the writing style was appropriate for the audience. I do always try to write in plain English anyway, but the reading level for this course would be aimed at 12 years old. I uploaded all my content into readable which scored my content. After some tweaks and word swaps, I ended up with content appropriate for a 15-16 year old, just because the word “Communication” is deemed as a complex word. As one of the courses contained this word, it was difficult to find an appropriate alternative to use!
Design
I created a storyboard for this course, which showed details of the intro and outro pages, lesson overviews and scenario pages. There were also some interactive areas which were storyboarded.
Each slide used a similar design to keep the feel consistent. Each topic had a slightly different accent on colour just to remind the learner that the content topic had changed.
Introduction to Soft Skills: Storyboarding.
Tools Used
- PowerPoint for storyboarding
- Articulate Storyline as the e-learning tool
- Articulate’s content library and Pexels for graphics and cutout people
- The assignments were created in Word, turned into PDF’s and uploaded to Moodle
- The quizzes were created using Moodle’s native quiz engine
Summary
The Introduction to Soft Skills e-learning course is available to access on the e-learning academy Moodle page. It consists of 4 learning units, quizzes and assignments. You can access the Articulate e-learning units by clicking on the links below: