The Challenge: Training that didn’t scale
Before building a tutorial library, Joshua’s training work was split across different formats including face-to-face help, screencasts, and PDF handouts. Each came with a tradeoff.
Some faculty were fine watching full videos. Others wanted a printable guide. And when someone needed help right now, building polished documentation meant taking screenshots, annotating, formatting, and redoing work over and over. That’s a lot of time.
As Joshua put it, the challenge wasn’t just creating training — it was creating it fast, making it look good, and making it reusable for the next person who asked the same question.
“A lot of them came because someone had this question and I’ve seen it more than once. It’s like, okay — we need a tutorial for this.”
The Shift: One process, multiple learning formats
Joshua didn’t want to abandon existing content styles. He wanted one workflow that could produce multiple outputs without multiplying the effort required to create them.
The learning point was realizing he could use iorad to go through a process once and support different learner preferences automatically:
-
Try it: interactive practice
-
Watch It (video-style walkthrough)
- Print it: a guide for those who want a handout
This mattered because faculty were often learning tasks in environments where mistakes felt risky, like actual gradebooks and courses. The interactive “safe practice” format helped solve this problem.
“I didn’t realize it was going to allow me to do all of those things at once.”
The Outcome: A self-serve help desk faculty actually used
Over time, the content stopped living in scattered places and became a searchable, organized library filled with tutorials, embedded into existing help desk pages and linked in email responses.
Joshua now uses tutorials in a practical, repeatable loop:
-
A question comes in
-
He answers it once with a tutorial
-
That tutorial becomes part of the library
-
The next time the question comes in, he sends a link — done
That reduces repeat work and makes training feel consistent across faculty and student audiences.
“It’s a one stop shop searchable and branded. It looks really nice.”
Why it worked: It matched how people actually learn
Joshua noticed something important: people don’t all learn the same way.
Some still want printouts. Many prefer video. But the biggest surprise was how much faculty responded to interactive tutorials that let them say, “wait, let me point.”
He also found the interactive mode helped build confidence, especially when someone is worried about making changes in a live system.
“They don’t want to mess it up... so it’s really kind of cool that it looks like I’m actually in the program.”
Looking ahead: Proactive training for new systems
With a new learning management system planned, Joshua isn’t just reacting to questions. He’s preparing ahead of time.
The goal is simple. When the rollout happens, training doesn’t start from scratch. Faculty and students get directed to a familiar place where everything is documented and easy to find.
“Now that we’ve gotten through a lot of the beginning... it’s building that library going forward.”