London (UK), May 2009 - Information security is critical to the smooth functioning of British Airways' business, and creating employee awareness about information security is a vital organizational requirement. In a project for BA, Tata Interactive Systems (TIS) used its proprietary Story-based Learning Objects™ (StoBLs™) approach to create a product that set the learning in the context of a realistic and pertinent narrative.
The story, structured as an investigation into an embarrassing security leak, provided the necessary immersion to keep employees engaged in the learning. The StoBLs™ structure also allowed British Airways to shorten the seat time of the course, and the positive completion rates have been matched by positive employee feedback about the course.
An earlier course in information security developed by British Airways was premised on objectives similar to this one - to provide learners with basic awareness of information security in the airline's context - but the feedback for BA's course was negative. Tata Interactive Systems' analysis of the old course and the learning goals of the new one suggested that though the content of BA's effort had been factual and conceptual, it was important to address the affective aspects of information security as well.
Tata Interactive Systems, therefore, used the Story-based Learning Objects™ methodology for the creation of this course, which made effective use of a time-tested medium like stories to deliver instruction that the conventional WBT/CBT formats were not very successful at imparting. While a conventional WBT/CBT could efficiently deliver factual or conceptual content, it was shown to have limitations when it comes to the affective domain. The affective content demands treatment that is immersive and not just interactive in the conventional sense.
The StoBLs™ methodology uses stories to create this much-needed immersion and packages for the learning within this medium. StoBLs™ also make use of conventional interactivity, but they use this feature in consonance with the story component. Interactivity is primarily employed to encourage the learner to draw the learning out from the story even as it creates learner engagement. In the BA scenario, TIS used animations to depict the story in the course; to meet BA bandwidth criteria, stylized illustrations were used for the animations.
The BA course was mandatory for managers and above and was available to all employees of the organization. The use of the StoBLs™ approach allowed British Airways to reduce seat time from ninety minutes to forty, and user feedback has been very positive.
For creating animations TIS used Flash MX. This was the obvious choice to meet the bandwidth restriction applicable to all BA courses - an average of less than 25 kb per page. Flash MX was the only tool that made it possible to create the required animations within the bandwidth restriction.
