CASE STUDY:
Low-budget, reusable Flashcard shell

Stanley E. Malcolm, Ph.D.

Business Objective: A low-cost means to encourage and support learning key product facts, company history, business basics, and/or current industry issues at "idle" moments in the business day. While hardly a "world-beater", this application has reinforcement value far in excess of the day or two of programming necessary to create the shell.

Operation: Think flashcards. The sample (below) targets product knowledge and was implemented as a screen saver. However, it would be just as easy to implement flashcards "decks" as stand-alone programs or from a company intranet site. They work this way: A question appears (randomly drawn from a database of questions). After a brief delay, the answer appears - then another question, another answer, and on and on until users feel they have mastered the content. If desired, the software could be scheduled to precede a traditional test of knowledge acquired.

SAMPLE SCREEN Flashcard Shell - Flashcard software for product knowledge memorization.

Copyright Aetna, Inc., 1994. All rights reserved. Used with permission.

About the Author: Stan Malcolm serves as a coach to companies wishing to develop or review their strategies for performance support, learning technologies, and/or corporate learning issues generally. Formerly, he headed learning technologies and performance support initiatives at Aetna, Inc. He can be reached at Stan@Performance-Vision.com or 860-295-9711.