Online Driver Safety Training: What You Need to Know

If you want quality, outcome-based online driver safety training, you need to understand what goes into creating a successful design. It’s all about your intent. If your goal is to simply cover your backside, there are several low-cost vendors who will gladly take your money. But you get what you pay for. They may cover hundreds of subjects, but they rarely lead to new and different behaviors. Simply stringing a bunch of glossy pictures of trucks and drivers together with a boring narrative droning on in the background does not lead to learning.

There are hundreds of factors to consider when building an adult curriculum. Over the past 30 years, we’ve refined the process by asking the right questions, creating effective designs, producing creative media and delivering learning in the most efficient manner possible. There are three components to building an effective Driver Safety Training:

1. Build for your target audience
2. Start with the end in mind
3. Choose the right delivery methodology for your operations

Define Your Target Audience

First, you need to understand the target audience. Who are they? What do they need to know? What do they know already? What are their interests? What are their limitations? We need the answers to these questions, before design can begin. But there’s more. Under each of these questions, are yet a dozen sub-questions. For example, under limitations we need to know language limitations, intelligence level, educational level, geographical disbursement, technological limitations, budgets and the potential for a positive return on investment.

Start With the End in Mind

Our outcome-based designs begin with the end in mind. We list everything the target audience will know after they have completed the course. Separately, we list the skills they will have mastered. Working backwards from these “final exams,” we create interesting designs, write scripts and produce media including video, audio, animations and graphics. Our designs strategically employ embedded questions, learning exercises and adult gaming to engage the student.

Delivering the Content

I can remember 25 years ago, right after Al Gore invented the internet, a lot of advertising agencies and media companies got into the business of developing “online training.” By then, we had already developed hundreds of successful outcome-based courses using a wide range of technologies such as videotapes, laser disks, CDi, CD-ROM, print and various combinations of media, also known as a “blended approach.” We tried to distance ourselves from the startups.

These new entrants knew how to cobble together glossy photographs and audio recordings to create what looked like self-driven PowerPoints. Using a Learning Management System, they delivered this media online and called it web-based training. Guess what? These products rarely work. They may cover the subject matter, but they rarely result in actual learning. Learning takes place when people think. Learning takes place when people are engaged. Sadly, many of these companies are still in business delivering schlock that may look pretty but doesn’t deliver improved performance.

Ask yourself, why would anyone invest in training if there isn’t the likelihood of a positive return? AvatarFleet’s designs consistently lead to improved behaviors, which reduce accident frequency, which improve our client’s profitability.