The Brightspace platform creates a humanized personal learning experience that helps learners feel supported and guided—even in the self-paced portion of the virtual learning experience—while allowing NEP to produce data that shows student engagement and success.
Opportunity
Virtual Training For Real-Life Scenarios
National Education Partners (NEP) partnered with National University System’s Workforce Education Solutions in late 2020 on their Peace Officers Standards and Training courses that provide effective virtual training in critical areas, including community policing. Although originally created as a solution for training opportunities during COVID-19, the hybrid virtual design was taken a step further to create a viable and engaging learning experience that provides more and better training options for law enforcement beyond the standard training models typically used by POST.
A subject-matter-expert group of law enforcement professionals and community advocates was assembled. The real-world state of relations between communities and law enforcement was discussed candidly, along with the necessary changes that would help facilitate positive change. From these meetings, critical community policing training elements were identified by the designer along with success measurements and guidance opportunities. In addition, the needs of the training audience were taken into consideration. Among these were the need for buy-in, real-world applicability, time to digest and internalize some of the more difficult areas being covered, and a chance to immediately practice what they were learning.
The fully virtual design was built to include self-paced, asynchronous knowledge-building activities and meaningful application and practice opportunities in low-stakes and/or no-stakes environments, something law enforcement never gets on the job. The design also includes a virtual synchronous session guided by a POST-certified facilitator, where collaborative and share-out spaces are provided for law enforcement to speak to their own real-world situations and how they plan to employ or have employed their new knowledge and skills in the situations they face every day.
The asynchronous, self-paced, non-facilitated portion of the course focuses on key areas of community policing and allows learners to take their time with difficult concepts and sticky situations. Rather than a standard “content delivery then application” design, the learners are first immersed in a variety of authentic potential crisis situations in embedded Articulate Storyline scenarios and given the opportunity to make the kinds of decisions they would be called on to make in real life.
Solution
Humanized Personal Learning
NEP is using the Brightspace platform to provide the best possible experiences for learners who, for the most part, have never used a learning management system. NEP uses widget-based, engaging visual designs with elements like custom roll-over graphics to help guide learners in the self-paced, non-facilitated portion of the course, so they know what elements are actionable and what to do first.
Personalization elements such as replacement strings on the homepage and within emails help connect the learner to the course and course materials on a human level, even without a facilitator for the self-paced portion of the course. Release conditions and the survey function in Brightspace allows NEP to provide the POST-required pre-assessment survey to their learners, where they can complete a self-assessment of their pre-course understanding and opinions prior to diving into the self-paced content.
The ability to embed trackable Articulate Storyline and Rise interactive objects creates a seamless learning experience even though multiple tools are being used in a single course environment. Similarly, the ability to seamlessly embed video from NEP’s internal Kaltura repository allows them to track crucial video viewing data for the contextual videos within the course.
The Class Progress tool allows learners to track their own progress and immediately begin where they left off the last time. Additionally, it provides invaluable information for those on the administrative side who are responsible for tracking learner completion in order to distribute certificates.
Intelligent Agents and Release Conditions are used in tandem to send personalized emails to learners to congratulate them on their successful completion of elements, alert them on how to register for the synchronous session, guide them in their progress, and shepherd them back to the course when they have been absent for a week or more.
The Brightspace platform creates a humanized personal learning experience that helps learners feel supported and guided—even in the self-paced portion of the virtual learning experience—while allowing NEP to produce data that shows student engagement and success.
Having a hybrid course where students can take the asynchronous portion at their own speed and then follow that up with a synchronous section to build on their knowledge with the instructor and other students is the best of both worlds. We can all learn and share with each other from our own unique life experiences, and that is what happened in this course.
Retired police chief, San Diego Police Department
Results
Improving Knowledge, Skills, And Abilities
The Brightspace platform allowed NEP to roll out a very interactive and engaging course to law enforcement officers in the state of California to help improve their knowledge, skills, and abilities related to community policing. With these new capabilities, law enforcement can also impact their broader communities, helping improve the collaboration and communication that occurs between communities and law enforcement. Through use of the Brightspace platform, these concepts can be presented in a manner that is engaging and allows participants to view topics through multiple perspectives, which strengthens their ability to understand and apply the concepts.
Since launching the course, learners have expressed that it’s an improvement over other courses they have taken through the POST program portfolio. They found the real-world videos and scenarios they incorporated rewarding and the program to be more realistic and of higher quality than other programs.
On how the course has changed learners’ understanding of community needs and priorities, one learner shared that their “understanding of the specific needs and priorities of the community has changed significantly.” They “now understand that communities are always shifting, and it is important to always be in touch with community leaders to keep up to date with the shift and their needs.”
A retired police chief of the San Diego Police Department shares: “The course was a good combination of reading, interactive decision-making, and thoughtful analysis and reflection. There are many ways to connect with students, and it is important to understand not all students learn the same way. Having a hybrid course where students can take the asynchronous portion at their own speed and then follow that up with a synchronous section to build on their knowledge with the instructor and other students is the best of both worlds. We can all learn and share with each other from our own unique life experiences, and that is what happened in this course.”
