Building Partnerships with Your Subject Matter Experts

When designing eLearning we need to do things early in the project, like assess what information the learners already know, what the key stakeholders expect the outcomes to be, and, most importantly, how best to mind the gap between those two. Often this is accomplished with the aid of subject matter experts (SMEs). But your project SMEs have many responsibilities, and their work with you is usually in addition to their regular work. While it’s great to have partners to provide project content and organizational insights, these relationships don’t always initially go as smoothly as we want them to.

During this session, you’ll learn strategies for how you can build connection and rapport with your SMEs and find work processes that respect both your workloads. You’ll discover how using the project kick-off meeting to acknowledge and address SME concerns is time well spent. You’ll also discuss in detail how to work with individual types of SMEs to keep the project moving forward.

In this session, you will learn:

• Tips for helping your SMEs manage having additional responsibilities added to their workload
• Tips for establishing a communication plan—for individual SMEs and across the project team
• How defining everyone's roles and core responsibilities will save time and effort
• Techniques for increasing clarity by mapping the design and development process

 

Handout(s)

Recording

December 12, 2018