AUDIENCE

Employees in state agencies who make contact with elderly populations.

DELIVERY

E-Learning

PROBLEM

This module was designed to encourage employees to report suspected elder abuse. Elder abuse is an under-reported problem because people don’t know what to look for – and there are so many potential warning signs. In the source content, there were long lists of signs and symptoms – easily overwhelming to learners. The question was, how to make these long, and very important, lists of potential warning signs and symptoms stick with learners?

SOLUTION

The SMEs noted that the topic of elder abuse “comes to life” for their trainees when they discuss realistic case studies. The SMEs provided the info needed to shape the case studies into a small story describing the different types of abuse, and from there, I came up with the idea of using the same character/avatar from the case study to illustrate each of the signs and symptoms. This gives the learners a context to understand each sign and symptom in terms of a character, rather than an easily forgettable bullet point. In addition, I suggested the use of a job aid to reference so that employees weren’t overwhelmed by the information and could refer to the document if they suspected elder abuse.

FILES

To see how this functionality works, take a look at this screenshot and this one.