Training Customers using Instructional Interactivity Principles

I just completed a two-day eLearning Instructional Design certificate program with the ATD (Association for Talent and Development*). I’ll say again that the organization doesn’t quite hit the mark for me, because my focus is on training customers and vendors for my clients, and most of the ATD members work for a sizeable corporations and are focused on training employees. While training customers has some similarities with training employees, in some ways it is very different. I have lots to say on this subject, so stay tuned!

However, I’d like to point out that the concepts of instructional interactivity that I learned for the certificate program still apply for training customers or end users. In fact, in some ways they may be even more important, as happy customers who are meeting their performance objectives with your software more directly affect your bottom line.
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In this post, I’d simply like to announce the upcoming topics I have planned related to this concept.  I plan to do a comparison of a “show me” type tutorial video and an eLearning activity designed to teach a customer the same task. I hope that my upcoming posts can explain how and why these are different and situations in which you might want to choose one over the other. This topic will take me some time to put together, so in the meantime, I will provide some related topics leading up to it, including:

• The process for developing a “show me” tutorial video
• The process for developing instructional interactivity type eLearning content