Effective Course Design Enables Customer Training Success
Over the years, NI has been developing automated test and measurement systems that help engineers solve the world’s toughest challenges. They’ve built comprehensive driver-level software, application software, and test operations software in their industry. With this innovation, and leading such a competitive industry, has come the need to support customers in using NI products. Effective and efficient customer education drives adoption and encourages customers to continue using and remain loyal to the product.
Enable Education has been a training and development partner to NI for many years and has provided support that focuses on training and development trends, tools, and strategies to help NI meet its business objectives. NI’s Education Services and Enable partnered again to design customer education courses for their systems engineering software product, LabVIEW.
The Need
NI is a multinational company that produces automated test equipment and virtual test instrumentation software to aid in researching and validating new technologies. They are responsible for making the hardware and software for testing and measuring 3G, 4G LTE and 5G, serving customers such as Qualcomm and Qorvo, carrier equipment providers like Samsung, carriers such as AT&T, and researchers at higher education institutions.
One of NI’s most popular products is LabVIEW (Laboratory Virtual Instrument Engineering Workbench). It offers a graphical programming approach that helps you visualize every aspect of your application, including hardware configuration, measurement data, and debugging. This visualization makes it simple to integrate measurement hardware from any vendor, represent complex logic on the diagram, develop data analysis algorithms, and design custom engineering user interfaces.
This powerful graphical programming environment is useful in numerous industries and NI needs to ensure their customers can use LabVIEW effectively and to its full potential for their unique applications.
NI and Enable’s partnership over the years has been based on NI bringing subject matter expertise on their business and Enable providing learning and learning-technology know-how, and this project was no different. NI required a course designed to onboard, engage, and retain their new and existing customers.
The Challenge
With today’s hyper-competitive market and ever-advancing technology, NI’s product capabilities are complex. To ensure customers receive the support they need to be successful, effective customer education programs are crucial.
While NI’s team of systems architects, engineers, and developers has deep knowledge of LabVIEW, its design, features, functionalities, capabilities, and applications, they identified a need to partner with learning experts. This is the role that Enable plays in our development partnership. Each partner brings their unique expertise to the equation and the result is a powerful and synergistic solution.
The Solution
NI’s team of subject matter experts (SMEs) worked with Enable’s learning experience designers (LXDs) to design video instructor-led training (VILT) with clearly articulated learning outcomes and topics covering content that would ensure learners meet those outcomes.
NI SMEs and Enable’s LXDs worked together to identify exactly what they wanted the course to achieve. Together they answered the question, ‘What will a successful course prepare learners to do?’ Once they’d identified what learners would be able to do after completing the course, they created learning outcomes (brief statements that describe what users will be expected to learn by the end of the course). Learning outcomes are a crucial element of the instructional design process - they ensure the content included and the activities designed for the course focus on the knowledge and skills that will be most valuable to the learner.
Once the course objectives and learning outcomes had been created the next step was to create a course outline that would ensure those learning objectives are met. In other words, the design team answered the question: ‘What do learners need to know in order to meet the learning outcome?’ In answering the question they created an outline with the content and instructional method mapped to each learning outcome.
The Outcome
The course outline is the blueprint used by the developers to create the final course. Without a course outline, the developers (and later on the course facilitators and learners) will not have a clear picture of the course they need to develop, present, or complete.
Working with NI’s Education Services and SMEs, the Enable team delivered a course outline ensuring that the right learning outcomes have been addressed, and the relevant need-to-know information included.
The clarity of the defined learning outcomes, the comprehensive course outline provided NI’s course developers with the level of detail they required to build out the learning artifacts required for the course: an instructor’s PowerPoint deck, facilitator guide and participant guide.
If you need help building a skilled workforce without stress, Enable Education can leverage your in-house expertise and convert it into stellar training experiences that drive productivity and culture. Schedule a call - we’d love to chat to you!