Beth Sargent Instructional Design
Best Friends Animal Society
Flagship Project
Just this year I've started volunteering my time for Best Friends Animal Society and it's been a blast. I'm helping with their training projects creating new materials and reviewing existing materials. Because of my love for animals the choice to volunteer for this organization was really easy. They are on a mission to reach no-kill shelters in America by end of 2025. If you're interested in learning more about them go to https://bestfriends.org/.
Anyway I've worked with a great vet creating a Rise site from a PowerPoint deck, critiqued several existing trainings (critique in a collaborative manner) and helped create courses for volunteer efforts. I love adding the pics of all of the animals and creating pawsome interactivities.
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My role: contributer designer and developer
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Audience: Best Friends employees
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Tools: Rise 360, SnagIt, Articulate AI
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Year: 2025
Process (ADDIE)
This was a collaborative effort where I designed and developed an interactive, blended elearning for one chapter in Articulate Rise 360. I implemented several of the built-in interactive blocks in Rise. The initial steps of this project were created by the author of the original documentation and I worked with one other ID to complete the course.
Action Map
Action mapping when volunteering isn't like something you'd do for a job or regular project, rather it's a way to keep in touch with who's doing what. This approach was a first for me.
Storyboard
This was created from and existing PowerPoint deck created by the expert in this subject. Once again, not what I'm used to but it sure makes it easy.
Final Product
My piece of the final product, Volunteer Engagement Strategies, was an interactive section designed to encourage and support volunteers. With lots of collaboration with the other creators, it became a nice show piece welcomed by the organization and published for the volunteers nationwide.
Results and key points
The flexibility of the folks at Best Friends is so refreshing! They're so easy to work with and are really appreciative of anything you do. Working on this project gave me a real sense of giving back. I highly recommend that, if you have any time to spare, volunteer for an organization that you believe in, it makes you feel great!
Technically, I've become much more adept at using the AI built into Articulate 360. All of the vector art on the flash cards was created with AI as well as some of the pictures in the process blocks.