Project Roles

Your Project Champion is a higher level leader with political authority to ensure the project receives the attention and resources committed throughout the training program's life cycle. Your unit should determine a project champion or lead prior to or shortly after requesting hosting in AbilityLMS. This person has the authority to make and/or communicate approvals for deliverables throughout the project.

Project Management is typically handled by a higher level Ability team member for projects where the Ability team are doing course development and for new hosting implementations. The instructional designer on a course development project may coordinate some of the coordination, reporting, and scheduling tasks. A project lead is recommended for the training program unit side also.

The Subject Matter Experts (SME)must have the full authority to make decisions about course content, as well as the trusted level of expertise on the subject.* As the SME, you alone work directly with your instructional designer – giving input throughout the project on a regular basis including participating in meetings, proofing content, writing feedback, and organizating any additional reviewers and their feedback.

• SME Responsibilities
  • Dedicating time to answer questions and review materials provided by the instructional designer and/or project coordinator.
  • Coordinating with your instructional designer to set a regular feedback schedule and process with your instructional designer. Attending meetings and being prepared to respond to any advanced questions. 
  • Ensuring accuracy and the right amount of thoroughness for the intended outcome.
  • Providing thorough and honest feedback to the instructional designer in areas of style and preference and considering alternative suggestions and explanations from the instructional designer. 
  • Answering questions about the prospective audience, about why certain content is needed or is missing, about the longer view of the training subject or larger communication and compliance plan. 
  • Serving as the liaison to your unit or for other experts and stakeholders; coordinating the collection of possible contradictory opinions of course facts, required processes or materials, and compiling feedback and questions. 
• Additional Reviewers

  The course subject expert is expected to organize any additional reviewers reviews early in the project. Avoid unnecessary rework and significant delays at the end of project. Every course requires multiple rounds of review and phases can be revisited. Bring in your reviewers at the right phase of the project.

  Define and communicate any additional reviewers role. For example:

  • "We know you are an expert in this subject/this audience/this unit's mission...We want you to help us clarify the outcomes we are trying to achieve. This will require thinking carefully about a list of what we want the target audience to be able to do, to what level of expertise, and how we could assess their learning to be sure the training is succesfully transferring the skills and information."
  • "You are recruited because you represent our target audience in your background. We want you to identify any places where the information is confusing or especially difficult. We want you to identify any places where the informatiuon is too rudimentary." 
  • "We need you to act as a proofreader. Please review this narration script and note any places where the wording could be simplified or phrased better for x audience.""We need you to give the content a final review and look for places where there are typos and grammatical errors."
  • It is common to bring in high level leadership to view a product's final version. These types of reviews are organized by the SME with all comments compiled into a single set of edits for the instructional designer/developer.

Your Instructional Designer will assist the SME in finding a good balance to meet the scope of training requirements within available resources and long-term goals by providing options and their trade-offs. If your course or presentation is being developed by a member of the ORRS Ability team, they may also act as a liaison with the Ability LMS administrator to plan and set-up tracking and consideration for broad impacts of your course. 

• ID Responsibilities

  Your Instructional Designer will guide the following choices for elements of instruction: 

  • Accessibility - Attending to universal audience access to the information and experience needed to successfully transfer new skills and knowledge. 
  • Attention - Focusing the learner's attention at each moment of the training on the right instructional parts of the training including animation, graphics, text; removing distractions from key information. 
  • Audio - Including development of narration scripts, recruiting voice talent, or applying AI-generated speech.
  • Cognitive load - Ensuring learners receive the right amount of new information with the right amount of time to absorb and internalize without becoming frustrated or unable to absorb more; this includes analyzing the audience background and providing scaffolds towards the goals.
  • Intellectual property - Assurance and documentation of legal ownership or licensing of images and other digital objects or permission to use and proper acknowledgements of resource material. 
  • Readability - using best use of hierarchy, navigation, accessibility (font style, color, size, background contrast and screenreader tags), focus, margins, focus, and word-choice (https://www.plainlanguage.gov/about/definitions/)
  • Style - Designing the layout, graphics, and tonal elements that contribute to a positive feeling for the experience and which ease the acceptance of new information.

  For additional insights into working with an instructional designer and experienced course developer see: 

  • https://omerad.msu.edu/teaching/instructional-design
  • https://nexus.engin.umich.edu/teach/instructional-designer/
  • https://prezi.com/1eun5i2r1npk/instructional-design/

Post-Project Administration requires your unit identify at least one person or job title that will be responsible for assisting learners and other unit representatives after the training is published. The more responsibility your unit takes on managing learners, the lower the demand on the Ability team. We will try to guide you to a plan that saves effort and costs for everyone.

Ability LMS Administrators oversee security role access to the Test and Production environment and give guidelines and recommendations on tracking including entitling tracks and courses and coordinating or if needed developing system communications, and working with legacy data and applications that are used to connect to other MSU systems or vendor systems. Ability team members will guide conversations about your compliance tracking set-up and access to training records and features for compliance administrators, trainers, and others using your course. The Ability team will consult with other LMS stakeholders and provide ongoing technical support for training program owners and learners.

• Post-Project Administration

  Early in your training program development, the Ability team will recommend you identify a person or position in your unit that will manage the program. Responsibilities can be shared with the Ability LMS support team, but may impact annual fees.