Summary of Client’s Challenge
Preventing fires is a fairly new important aspect of the fire fighter’s toolkit. Prevention means engaging in various activities in private home and commercial buildings that lead to a lower or eliminated likelihood of a fire occurring. However, firefighters are primed to fight fires, and when you are preventing fires from taking place, the main focus of firefighters’ efforts changes. The National Fire Academy understood that getting buy in by firefighting stations and their people all over the United States was going to be a heavy lift.
Change by Design has a very strong background in the science of prevention, although we had never worked in the area of firefighting and safety. Based on our strength in building evidence-based course design structures, we were hired as a collaborative partner for the project.
How The Fire Prevention Process Factors Into eLearning Coursework
It was important to learn all about the fire prevention process, as well as understand the barriers and pluses related to implementation of this process in fire stations all over the U.S. We knew that the best way to achieve adoption of this process was to deliver a course that give learners opportunities to ‘try out’ some of the prevention behaviors.
Change by Design developed a case study that we would use to build out activities, ensuring that learners would engage in part-task practice, with a great deal of explanatory and corrective feedback. The goal was to develop in learners a belief that it was a process they could adopt and that it was doable regardless of past experience or tenure.
Fire-fighting SME Interviews As The Basis For The Online Course Structure and Content
After extensive research and analysis, we then engaged in a two-day meeting with four identified firefighters, experts in fire prevention, from various parts of the U.S. to collaboratively design the course. As the result of the meeting, we designed a four-hour online course. This served as the blueprint and bones for the development team, who built out the training and deployed it to NFA member stations.
Contact Change by Design today if you need an evidence-based online course design, which can be used to build out and develop learning modules that pertain to safety or OSHA regulation.