Thinking Cap |
Company |
Products |
Services |
Partners |
Clients |
Support |
Studio LCMS |
Campus LMS
 | |
Success Stories
Each month come back to read a case study of a Thinking Cap® success. You can also take away a PDF of this month's or previous cases. Want to receive these automatically? Join our newsletter.
Thinking Cap enables development of courseware for Web and Print and bypasses the traditional bottlenecks of distributed teams. Invest in Kids was going to create the very best Parenting training available. It was going to start in the Womb and go on for one and a half years post partum. It was going to be face to face and online and it would draw on the depth of knowledge of an established authority on early years and an old hand at face to face training.
Online training however was new. Invest in Kids had hired large firm Provinent to assist in creating the program but still they faced mountains of textual content and a big question mark about how to implement their vision. The outside firm had an experienced lead Instructional Designer; however the process couldn’t work with her single handedly transforming mountains of Word files into online courses. The first problem was that there just too much content and secondly, all the Instructional Design experience in the in the world couldn’t replace Invest in Kids’ Subject Matter Expert’s understanding of the domain.
Thinking Cap Author and Professional Services team was the solution. Our core contribution was to facilitate the creation of the Instructional Design Model (IDM) for the Parenting Partnership Project. This is a configuration document used by the Thinking Cap Author that defines the elements used in the curriculum. In addition to defining these elements the IDM defines how and when these types can be used. For example on an Information Page you can’t add a Drag and Drop Question or when you are adding a Multiple Select Question. The IDM codifies and manages the vision of the Instructional Designer allowing authors and subject matter experts to be the workhorse of the content creation process- all without requiring the authoring team to be technically proficient beyond the use of a browser and word processor.
As soon as their team was established and well on their way to creating content, Thinking Cap’s Professional services team embarked on the next phase: Create the instructions for how to layout the content. The Thinking Cap team was able to create the code enabling Invest in Kids to layout the content once, with that layout reflected in the whole body of the project. This was a great advantage and meant that once the JavaScript, CSS and HTML for an element was created, Invest in Kids could create endless instances of each element with no additional production work needed. The other great advantage of this approach was that authoring could go on in full force without the Production work being finished. From a production perspective, this is the key feature of separating content from presentation - they don’t hold each other up!
Another key feature in separating content from presentation is the ability to do Single Sourcing. In the context of The Parenting Partnership they were able to define a Delivery Template for the Web and deliver the course via the LMS and at the same time have a template for Print and distribute much of the content as PDF Workbooks that are formatted to take advantage of the strengths of the print medium.
The Parenting Partnership’s production was transformed by Thinking Cap. Unlocked from a single bottle neck for content development the team was able to work with authors and subject matter experts from Invest in Kids, Provinent, and freelance writers located across Canada. Thinking Cap Author managed the Instructional Design rules to maintain consistency and quality across the project while allowing Invest in Kids to safeguard the content and the message.
The Case Study continues next month as we look at how The Parenting Partnership used the Thinking Cap LMS to deliver the program.
Download the PDF
Archived Success Stories
