Integrated Learning Is a Beautiful Thing

SSCS continues to refine its instructional tools and a big part of that is working diligently to ensure they fit hand in glove.

At the beginning of the year we gave you a rundown of our growing stockpile of training tools, designed collectively to reach the broadest possible swath of instructional needs.

The quest for improvement is a never ending one. Our exploration of video instruction has only just begun and we have many new releases queued up for later in the year.

Not that we’re giving short shrift to our print publications. We’re right now in the process of going through a painstaking, comprehensive review of the source user guide for our flagship product, Computerized Daily Book (CDB), the content of which is single-sourced directly to the context-sensitive help built into our applications.

We’re personally involved so we can say from first-hand experience it’s a satisfying process. We have the pleasure of working with quality assurance staff and the CDB Team Lead at regularly scheduled meetings in which we share knowledge and together make new discoveries. It creates a nice sense of camaraderie which sets a positive tone for what is a sometimes grueling review.

Our first goal is to ensure the book and help stay up to date and accurate. Our second goal is to reorganize material so that subsequent CDB releases benefit from help that is more granular and form-specific than ever.

Those are fundamentally sound objectives, but what we find most exciting is something new: tightly aligning our written material to that of our videos, making for a cohesive knowledge base.

This manifests several ways. We’re creating links in the online help and user guide to videos that provide additional information on individual sections of material. We’re also integrating components of the videos—visuals, flow charts, terms, not to mention a procedural and contextual approach—reformatted for the printed page.

Conversely, we’re setting up the book with an eye to what our video team will find most useful when they begin production on new subjects and need material to use as a source. Not only is this good for our customers, it makes our production team faster and more efficient.

In another significant move, our publications department has worked intimately with our training department to help make sure the material they use in class seamlessly integrates into the rest of what we create for users. We fully expect that when a new customer comes to classroom training in our Salinas headquarters, the instructional tools they access when they get back on the job will allow them to pick up right where they left off.

And all of it is created in house.

In a way it’s a shame that only our users can see the end result of these stirring new developments. We guess that’s one more reason to become an SSCS user!