Introduction to Security at DevCo
This e-learning experience introduces DevCo’s security culture to new employees as part of their new employee induction.
Interactive
Learners get dozens of opportunities to interact and explore this learning experience, which helps maintain interest.
Personalized
Legal compliance requires the employee to enter their full name. I use Javascript to extract the first name and personalize the experience.
Story-based
Each section reinforces its main point with a real story involving a DevCo employee. These stories reinforce DevCo’s security culture.
Introducing DevCo’s Security Culture
DevCo provides security-related services to government, security agencies, and corporate clients. Security is crucial to DevCo’s success, and the company prizes its security culture.
The Background
DevCo wanted a way to introduce new employees to the company’s security culture during its induction programme.
The company didn’t want this learning experience to teach practical security measures. Instead, its purpose is to convey the following to new employees…
- Introduce DevCo’s security culture
- Reinforce the importance of security at DevCo
- Reveal security breaches experienced by staff members
- Stress the need to report every security breach immediately
Having settled on the purpose and scope of the e-learning experience, I met with DevCo’s Internal Security Team (DIS). They helped me create an Action Map outlining the topics we’d need to cover in the learning experience.
DIS also directed me to employees who had experienced a security breach so I could document their stories.
- Storyline 360
- MindMeister
- Powerpoint
- Word
- The Gimp
- Audacity
- DaVinci Resolve
- Envato
- Javascript
The Action Map
As a component in DevCo’s employee induction programme, this learning experience had a prescribed thirty-minute time limit.
DevCo’s Internal Security Team had over thirty minutes of material, and it became clear we would need to exclude some material. I suggested we create an Action Map that showed us…
- A high-level overview of every topic at a glance
- How each topic relates to its siblings
Once we had created the Action Map (click on the image to view), a clear sequential series of topics emerged. We retained topics that fit the sequence and dropped the rest.
Click the Action Map to expand
Design
Introduction to Security at DevCo has a sequential flow, although learners can hop between lessons once they’ve completed the compliance step.
The course material is dry, and there was no scope for an interactive experience such as my implementation of the Countdown Numbers game. Therefore, I decided to focus on interactive elements and stories about security breaches.
DevCo was especially keen to remove the stigma of experiencing a security breach and stress the importance of reporting the incident immediately.
Each lesson screen has a similar layout, with sections for an introduction, an interactive element, a Case button that reveals a security breach story, and a button to proceed to the next lesson.
As soon as learners are familiar with the layout, they can quickly and easily navigate the course.
Development
I favour a rapid interactive development process and use prototypes to develop an e-learning experience.
This course contains a lot of written content. I wrote the scripts first, placed them in a storyboard, and submitted them along with the designs for client review.
Once the client was happy with the content, I used Storyline 360 to create an interactive prototype. The prototype had no branding, images, audio, or video. Its purpose was to allow the client to experience the course content and spot issues.
Having obtained approval for the content and design, I began sourcing the remaining assets, producing the video, and incorporating them into the prototype.
I built the custom quiz from scratch in Storyline, as it allowed me additional control over the format and design.
Implementation and Evaluation
DevCo added Introduction to Security at DevCo to the new employee induction programme without conducting a trial. The company wasn’t interested in quiz results or other metrics.
The client’s purpose was to convey the importance of security at DevCo, leave an expectation of more training to come, remove the stigma of experiencing a security incident, and stress the importance of reporting it.
The client was happy the e-learning experience achieved its stated purpose.
