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Using Lotus Notes as a CBT Tool

Published in the Society of Technical Communicators (STC) Conference Proceedings

By Anne H. Bennett

This paper focuses on the issues involved in using Lotus Notes to deliver basic computer-based training (CBT). Specifically, I explore how information designers can use Lotus Notes functionality in a creative way to build courses that meet traditional computer-based training design requirements such as immediate feedback, tracking capability, and interactivity. Finally, I discuss some of the limitations in choosing Lotus Notes over more traditional delivery methods.

Choosing an Appropriate CBT Delivery Method My online research on the topic of Lotus Notes and computer-based training (CBT) yielded little insight into my key questions:

Under what circumstances are organizations choosing Lotus Notes to design and deliver computer-based training? What are the problems organizations face when using Lotus Notes to deliver training? While several articles echoed the opinion that technology can be used to improve or accelerate learning, I was challenged to find an article about an organization that built an effective and interactive training course using Lotus Notes. Given the dearth of information on this topic, I wondered if people are simply not sharing their experience or if most organizations are unaware of how to use Lotus Notes creatively to build and deliver CBT courses.

We know that CBT can offer myriad benefits to learners in the 21st century. Since virtually every employee uses a personal computer to do business, it makes sense to leverage the accessibility and corporate investment to meet critical training needs.

Once the decision to build a CBT course has been made, there are no steadfast rules for selecting a design and delivery method. While the list of criteria for making a smart decision is often long, it typically includes those ubiquitous constraints of budget and time. For some organizations, a standalone CBT course that combines the richest forms of multimedia such as text, graphics, interactivity, sound, animation, and/or video may be preferred. For organizations with more stringent budget and time constraints, other CBT possibilities exist. In this paper, I explore the advantages and disadvantages of using Lotus Notes—an unconventional, yet powerful tool for delivering highly effective computer-based training without the cost and time associated with higher end multimedia courses.

Make sure the technology helps you meet your design requirements

I want to ground my discussion of CBT courses designed and delivered in Lotus Notes with a quick recap of a few important elements of good CBT design:

Make the course interactive

• Give learners the ability to bookmark their place in the course
• Give learners random access to content when appropriate and create a “controlled path” when necessary
• Make it easy for learners to navigate through the training
• Assess learners’ understanding and provide immediate feedback
• Simulate the actual work environment as closely as possible
• Enable supervisors to track learners’ progress
• Enable quick and easy updates if course content changes regularly

This list of design requirements, although not exhaustive, is most likely familiar to information designers who create CBT courses. In order to design and create courses that meet our requirements, we must have a solid understanding of the delivery environment and the capabilities of the delivery tool. And, for organizations that use Lotus Notes as their communication backbone, it may make sense to take advantage of that everyday, well-known technology that helps propel the business. In fact, that may be the best reason to design a Lotus Notes-based training course: when your audience knows and understands the software and your organization already has the infrastructure in place to develop and deliver courses quickly and inexpensively.

Leverage Lotus Notes’ functionality to build effective training—a case study From 1997 to 1999, a group of information designers at my company created several Lotus Notes-based training courses for a large corporation in the financial industry. Since Lotus Notes was the primary tool our client used to communicate internally, the employees were relatively comfortable and familiar with it. In addition, they had a group of skilled Lotus Notes developers on staff. Given that changing government regulations directly impacted the business, this organization had to train its employees on a regular basis in order to get its services and products to market quickly. Furthermore, the corporate culture strongly supported using computers to deliver training to its geographically dispersed employees.

Our information designers learned a lot about our audience’s needs, work environment, and preferences during an up-front analysis. Ultimately, considering the nature and size of the training audience, the nature of the training objectives, and the organization’s existing technical infrastructure, we proposed that several computer-based training courses be designed, developed, and delivered at the desktop in Lotus Notes. To understand how Lotus Notes can function as a tool for delivering computer-based training course, it is important to understand its built-in functionality. Below, I outline how we took advantage of Lotus Notes’ features to build courses that helped us meet our standards for effective CBT:

User-friendly interface. For the main menu of each course, we used full-screen navigators, with graphic backgrounds relevant to the desired look and feel of the course. This menu served as the launch point in each training course. For lower-level menus in some courses, we used the smaller navigators on the left-hand side of the three-paned screen. However, even in these cases, we populated the navigators with attractive graphic backgrounds that included clearly identifiable and usable buttons. At the document level, we created banners that carried a consistent look and feel throughout the course. To increase functionality and usability, we often embedded navigation buttons (i.e., Next and Back) and links directly into the Notes documents.

Interactivity. We provided interactivity in two primary ways: “quick check” activities and point-and-click exercises. We built quick check activities into all of our CBT courses so users could answer questions about the content and receive immediate feedback to validate their understanding. At the lowest end, the quick checks were simple multiple-choice questions. We created them by writing questions in standard text and then using expandable/collapsible sections for each answer option. When users clicked each answer option, the section expanded to provide feedback. To create more sophisticated, game-like quick checks, we used some of the advanced formatting features in Notes documents. Specifically, we created a “Jeopardy”-like gameboard using a document table. We populated the table cells with buttons (indicating the number of points each question was worth). When users clicked a button, they were taken to a new document where the question was written. When users clicked an answer, they launched an additional document that provided feedback. For systems training, we created interactivity by using full screen navigators with a graphical background of the system screen captures. We placed hotspots on each screen capture to highlight new features. When users clicked a hotspot, they saw a popup box with text describing the feature and explaining how it should be used. The popup box was actually an illusion. Because Notes does not provide this functionality, we faked the interaction by having our graphic artist take the same background (i.e., screen capture) and draw in an appropriate popup box that described each feature.

Branching. When our client wanted to control the learning path, we linked documents together in a linear fashion. In other courses, we linked navigators or used a combination of linked documents and linked navigators to make users read information in a particular order. If users tried to follow a different path, a dialog box appeared letting them know they had to go through each section in order. In some cases, while users were forced down a particular learning path the first time through the course, Lotus Notes functionality allowed us to then give users random access trough the course to tailor the training for their specific needs.

Bookmarking. When it was important for users to keep track of where they had been in a course, we handled it in two ways. In one case, the entire course was a series of linked, full-screen navigators. The users’ path through the navigators was completely controlled at the backend. Users moved through the screens chronologically, and after reaching the end of a section, would return to the main menu. We created a separate graphic of the main menu, but one which displayed a “checkmark” graphic next to the section they had just completed. We also handled bookmarking with linked documents. Using Notes backend ability to track user access to documents, we were able to determine where users had left off in a series of linked documents. We did this by ordering the documents using a “Next Document” field in our database document form.

Tracking. We took advantage of Lotus Notes’ built-in ability to track the documents users had accessed. Also, the Notes developers created a utility that sent an e-mail message to supervisors to let them know when an employee had completed a training course.

Understand when not to use Lotus Notes as a CBT tool
Several factors influence the effectiveness and advantages of using Lotus Notes as a CBT tool. It may not make sense to use Lotus Notes to deliver training even if the culture in your organization supports or relies on the technology to communicate. Here are some of the downsides to using Lotus Notes to deliver training.

Design Limitations
A less sophisticated interface than some high-end multimedia development tools Low-end interactivity Limited capability to provide video, animation, or sound

Learning Environment Limitations
Learners may not take the training course because it’s always available on their desktop and therefore “forgotten” or not taken seriously.

Management may not reserve (or budget) time on the learners’ behalf to take the course in a quiet, uninterrupted environment.

As the technology now stands, using Lotus Notes as a CBT tool should be considered when the advantages of providing desktop delivery in the current environment outweigh the disadvantages of low-end interactivity and a less sophisticated interface. Making this determination depends largely on understanding the unique needs of your audience.

REFERENCES

1. Jeiven, Helene, “A Common-Sense Checklist for CBT,” Training and Development, July 1994.
2. McAteer, Peter. F., “Harnessing the Power of Technology,” Training and Development, August 1994.
3. Barron, Tom, “Getting Friendly with Authoring Tools,” Training and Development, May 1996.