Onboarding New Starters at St Mary's
Project info
Year: 2025
Tools: Articulate Rise and Storyline, Figma, Adobe Premiere Pro, Kallidus
For: St Mary's University
Skills: Learning design, Writing, Video editing, Graphic design, Needs analysis, Adult learning theory, Project management
About this project
Over the years, the digital services team at St Mary’s have noticed several knowledge gaps in academic staff. Given no initial introduction to IT, new starting academics often lack fundamental knowledge about the university’s technology and systems. This contributes to an influx of IT support tickets about recurring problems, often exposing core misunderstandings and costing the support teams considerable time to deal with.
Working with five of these teams, I led the development of a training intervention to orient new starters to St Mary’s technology. The training would be made mandatory on the official university LMS to build it into the organisation and give a smooth entry to the university.
My role was to:
- Work with support staff to identify recurring queries from staff
- Design a curriculum to address knowledge gaps using backward design
- Developing five short, targeted microlearning courses (15 minutes each) in Articulate Rise
- Manage the course rollout on the Kallidus LMS
New starters get an onslaught of information in their first few weeks. To reduce cognitive load and get the information to stick, I prioritised the most important information, chunked content into manageable units, and used a variety of media and tasks to reinforce ideas. Each course used practical scenarios to ground the content in real-world problems. I also created a unique visual identity for each course, trying my hand at some graphic design.
What's next?
An ongoing challenge will be how to track the outcomes of this training, beyond completion rates. As I return to this project in future, I’d like to incorporate more direct feedback from academics to refine the training and better understand how to build their confidence in the first few weeks on the job.
Narrative essay lesson
Teaching English with videos
Reworking a poetry lesson
Gamification and interactivity