Jackrabbit Learning Experience – Envisioning and designing scaled online learning tailored for your needs

Jackrabbit Learning Experience is a consulting, design, and development agency for organizations that create online courses or programs. It helps clients envision, design, and scale online learning programs tailored to their needs. It is fortunate to work with a variety of healthcare organizations, higher education institutions, non-profits, startups, and large corporations.

Learning Experience Design

Every organization has different learning needs. That’s why the tailor side-by-side consulting to help you envision new programs, reimagines existing content, selects the right technology, and develops a plan that fosters preparedness throughout the organization. From online courses for higher education to patient education, to professional development for organizations, Jackrabbit LX’s human-centered approach to learning experience design puts the learner first. Let their LXD team turn your complex content into a streamlined learning experience. Create engaging learning experiences that last. They use dynamic content mapping, prototyping, design playbooks, and continuous feedback loops to equip you with beautifully crafted learning environments. Leave compelling content production to the experts. From writing and editing to project management and accessibility standards, they create video and audio for learning experiences that resonate. Think beyond “one and done” engagements. They partner with you to create a continuous feedback loop for implementing user feedback, optimizing performance, and solving challenges as they arise.

Five Macro Phases

Depending on the need, they can start and end at any phase. Through every phase, Jackrabbit seeks to balance creativity with the research and literature of teaching and learning and the elements that make a program unique. Pedagogically, they lean toward creating active learning experiences that include compelling and interactive instruction using case studies, storytelling, and real-life problem solving. This approach makes each experience applicable to the learner’s everyday life (or the life and work they are aspiring to!).

Discover: The Discover phase involves research designed to uncover and account for anything essential to the program’s success, such as their partner’s key performance indicators, how best to work with faculty or subject matter experts, successful competitive products or models, existing data about the current version of the program, unique learner needs, and more. The Discover phase might also uncover cultural norms that lie beneath the surface or unaccounted for opportunities. With the big picture in mind, they help their clients refine their vision for the future.

Clarify: In the Clarify phase, they organize what they’ve learned in the Discover phase to make it functional and useful throughout the rest of the project. When they deliver something, they focus on getting the work done and ensuring that the work can be clearly quantified for reporting purposes. The Discover and Clarify phases typically have the following deliverables:

1. A Project Brief and Design Document that concisely captures critical decisions about the program
2. A “Core Evidence and Standards” document to capture all of the quality standards and success metrics that they’ve identified through discovery. This document will become a checklist that they will use during course development to ensure their work is satisfying all of the goals they’ve set for them.
3. A Project Roadmap that details timelines, roles and responsibilities, workflow, etc.

Prototype: Using the ideas and standards generated in the previous stages, they select a portion of one course with at least a single instance of every element they need to design and develop. This prototype will serve as a sample to test with learners and refine their design before creating at scale. Once fully completed, the prototype will also be a blueprint for us to reference when creating the rest of the materials. A functioning prototype with real content, activities, media, etc. that can be reviewed by learners and other stakeholders is the primary deliverable for this phase.

Playbook: A playbook is an informative guide and collection of resources that stores everything they need to help us and their clients create courses at scale. The playbook will include templates for the design and development process and best practices that apply to each phase and element of the course. It begins with discerning who the learners are and what overall vision their client hopes to achieve through the course. It then moves to the how of defining more specific learning outcomes and assessments, followed by an in-depth look at each element of the learning model (including instruction, collaboration, assessment, media, etc.). A playbook is a “living deliverable” used by the team as it grows to accommodate a larger-scale design and production effort. It is critical to ensure consistency of quality within the learner’s experience of a course (including look and feel, media and activity types, assessment style, feedback mechanisms, use of the technology, etc.).

Scale: Using the Prototype and the Playbook, they begin full-scale creation of the courses within a program. At this point, they will have determined what must go into the product, which will allow us to move quickly and decisively. In full-scale production, project management and communication become increasingly important as there are many more moving parts. Courses will be created in stages with clear quality benchmarks based on the Evidence and Standards document (which will have been revised after creating the Prototype), using the Prototype as an exemplar.

About | Jason Gorman

Jason Gorman is the Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Jackrabbit Learning Experience. For over 20 years, Jason has been designing powerful, vibrant, and emotionally engaging environments for learners of all ages. As the CEO of Jackrabbit LX, he leads a team of experts in consulting and design, as well as developing innovative educational programs, products, and experiences. He believes that learning design is about people, and he starts with empathy and a deep understanding of the learner and their ecosystem. His relational style of leadership and design aims to bring the best out of people for people.

"We want to see everyone in our company succeed and we work with each employee to help them become self-actualized in their work. We are dedicated to supporting and helping each person with their professional journey."