New learning design team, standards and content that matters

Organization: Shared Services Canada, Government of Canada
Sector: Federal government / public sector

 

The situation: Shared Services Canada (SSC) had no dedicated eLearning design capacity. Individual program teams were trying to develop their own training with no standards, no process, and no strategic oversight. Someone needed to build that infrastructure before any learning could be designed well or consistently.

 

What I did: I started by understanding the landscape before designing a solution. I mapped what the organization needed, then built the foundation for a design practice from scratch. That meant creating a project intake and vetting process, a prioritisation framework to manage competing demands, design and development standards, and documented workflows so the team could operate consistently. I also developed WCAG 2.2 accessibility guidelines for all courses hosted on the LMS and led the accessibility testing of courses submitted by other teams before they could be uploaded to the platform.

 

I hired and onboarded a multimedia designer to complete the two-person team. Together we managed a portfolio of projects spanning onboarding, information management, emergency preparedness, and document management, all designed in both English and French and reaching up to 9,000 SSC employees per course.

 

The result: SSC went from having no internal eLearning design capacity to having a functioning, standards-based design practice with a clear intake process, a prioritised project queue, accessibility standards everyone had to meet, and a track record of completed courses active in the LMS. A repeatable, quality-assured approach to learning design that any future team could build on.

 

Deliverables:

• Project intake, vetting, and prioritisation process

• Design and development standards and documented workflows

• WCAG 2.2 accessibility guidelines and evaluation rubric

• Accessibility testing and approval process for third-party courses

• Portfolio of completed bilingual eLearning courses