GA Projects, III

Concluding these posts about the graduate assistant projects at the Institute for Interactive Technologies at BU I will discuss the remaining projects with the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania Department of Labor and Industry and with Kawneer. In my previous sessions I wrote about the Kellogg's and Black & Decker projects that are underway for the spring semester of 2008 as well as the Marketing campaign for the MSIT intended to attract the top 20% of undergraduate seniors to our program.

Building a Skilled Workforce

The Client

Ernest Cherry, Amanada Bradley and Nicole Clark are the GAs working under the tutelage of Instructional Designer Pam Berman on the ongoing grant project awarded by the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania's Department of Labor & Industry. The Industry Partnership Worker Training Grant is geared at Information and Communication Technology (ICT) employees in Centre, Clinton, Columbia, Lycoming, Mifflin, Montour, Northumberland, Snyder and Union counties here in eastern Pennsylvania.

The Need

In today's economy, businesses need highly skilled works; the commonwealth and its economic regions need top quality companies and workers. The target audience is ICT employees in manufacturing, finance, and heath care industries. The aim is training, education, and workforce development programs to higher skill jobs in demand by industry, thereby enhancing the competitive position of the industry cluster and providing long term earnings and career opportunities for employees.

The Solution

The development of this year's training are Web Development, E-Commerce, and Managing IT employees. The stand alone training courses will be hosted on the IIT Department's LMS (Adobe Connect). The Web Development module is complete and work is progressing for the E-Commerce and Management of IT employees training. The ICT employees are free to utilize the training to achieve the designed goals outlined by their institution, company and the commonwealth.

Troubleshooting for Engineers

The Client

Jason Ramos under the guidance of Instructional Designer Vince Basil are working with fine engineering staff at Kawneer, now a division of Alcoa. The Kawnner plant of Bloomsburg fabricates aluminum doors and frame-sets.

The Need

Recently, a large machine designed in Germany has been installed in the Kawneer plant here in Bloomsburg. This complex door and frame automation fabrication system has translation discrepancies in the instructions leaving their system operation instructors thrown at times. The company has trained their workers to acceptable standards for normal operations however when a problem occurs, the workers may be unfamiliar with the given issue.

The Solution

Instructions & troubleshooting guides for the fabrication system's top dilemmas. Troubleshooting training development has been underway and continues as the team works at odd hours and with highly skilled subject matter experts to properly record the correct sequence of steps necessary to solve a given issue. These guides are being developed and saved as hyper-link active PDF formats as well as additional monitors installed at each work station so the operators can have quick access to the recovery procedures.

Cheers to the hardworking Graduate Assistants in the IIT for the MSIT. I look forward to the upcoming projects and to hear continued success stories being shared by everyone.

Thank you to the Instructional Design Team working so diligently with the students and the staff making the IIT the highly reputable name that it is.