Instructional design/WBT risks

Instructional Design: Homepage > Identifying WBT Risks > Risky Business > Step 1: Identify > Your Turn - Risk Identification > Step 2: Prioritize > Your Turn - Risk Prioritization > Step 3: Mitigate > Your Turn - Risk Mitigation > The Risk Plan > Lesson Conclusion

Lesson Introduction

As an Instructional Designer, you’re often expected to wear multiple hats. If you search a job site like monster.com or astd.org, you’ll find companies looking for Instructional Designers who can also create graphics, edit audio, work in one or two different course authoring tools, program in Flash, and manage the entire course development process. Even if you’re fortunate enough to work with professionals who can supplement your skill set, the Instructional Designer is frequently tasked with managing the project. That means the Instructional Designer is held accountable if a project is late, over budget, or fails to meet the client’s requirements. If you’ve developed any sort of instructional project, you already know that a lot can go wrong. You can avoid some very stressful situations, save a lot of time, and ensure a high-quality product by planning for the things that could go wrong (or the project risks) before they occur.

In this lesson, you’ll learn a simple process for risk planning. While the lesson focuses on risk planning for Web-based training (WBT), you can (and should) use this process for other mediums such as Instructor-led training (ILT). By taking the time to learn and use this process, you’ll avoid many sleepless nights as an Instructional Designer/Project Manager or Technical Lead.

Lesson Goal

The Project Manager or Technical Lead for a WBT development team will identify and prioritize risks for a WBT project in order to determine action items for risk mitigation. The result will be a risk plan that contributes to the on time, on budget, and on scope delivery of the WBT project.

Key Learning Objectives

Key learning objectives describe the specific performances you will be able to do upon completion of the lesson.

• Given a fictitious WBT project, you will be able to develop a risk plan. The risk plan must be 85% consistent with a risk plan created by an expert.
  • Given a scope statement for a WBT project, you will be able to generate five potential risks associated with the project.
  • Given the project scope statement and the transcript of a risk assessment meeting, you will be able to prioritize a potential risk based on probability and impact.
  • Given three high-priority risks for the WBT project, you will be able to determine two action items for mitigating each potential risk.

Lesson Navigation

This lesson was designed to be completed in about 20 minutes. You can navigate through the lesson by clicking "Next" at the bottom of each page. The labeled links at the top of each page show your lesson progress and can be used to jump to a specific topic. To open a hyperlink in a new tab or window, hold down the CTRL button while selecting the link.

Click Next to start this lesson.