Train-the-Trainer

Enspire Learning worked with the American Heart Association to produce a critical train-the-trainer curriculum that features quality video and Enspire’s signature storytelling approach.

Challenge

The American Heart Association (AHA) is a national voluntary health agency whose mission is to reduce disability and death from cardiovascular diseases and stroke. AHA approached Enspire Learning with the need to train a diverse and geographically dispersed audience of over 250,000 volunteer instructors. These instructors have diverse backgrounds and educational experiences, and many had never received formal instructor training. They understood the principles of CPR and advanced cardiac life support, but how effectively could they teach these skills to their students?

A further challenge was that AHA had little means to mandate training to their volunteer instructors. The solution needed to be seen as immediately valuable to the instructor corps or they would self-select themselves out of the modules.

Approach

Because of the size and distributed nature of their audience, AHA needed a cost-effective, flexible, and scalable solution. Furthermore, they needed to create a curriculum interesting enough to engage an audience of volunteers. Ultimately, Enspire and AHA decided on a blended approach, combining elements of video, instructor-led, and online training. In total, Enspire created ten hours of online training, plus additional instructor-led support materials, including workbooks, instructor manuals, DVDs, and performance support tools.

Enspire used a narrative approach, communicating lessons through compelling characters and storylines. Enspire exposed the learners to both positive and negative scenarios and provided interactive exercises, such as an interactive “um” counter, designed to reinforce learning. The program goes beyond the skills needed to perform CPR to focus on greatly improving the classroom.

Outcome

Enspire delivered the blended program to a steering committee of AHA leadership in mid-2006. It was well-received by the organization and officially released to the instructor audience in the fall of 2006. The audience can take the courses online, via CD-ROM, in an instructor-led classroom (through a DVD version), or in a combination of those three media. AHA and Enspire made the material flexible so that each AHA training center could choose which delivery option was best for them. The e-learning portion of the AHA Train-the-Trainer curriculum was awarded a Silver Medal in the 2006 Horizon Interactive Awards.

Return on Investment

The curriculum continues to be used by AHA. Since the curriculum’s launch, AHA has conducted several studies about the efficacy of the program using Kirkpatrick’s levels of training evaluation.