Projects from GP Strategies

I worked with GP Strategies for about 5 years, and worked on over 500 projects altogether – supporting several dozen through a full product cycle. GP Strategies creates E-learning online SCORM-compliant training modules (doesn’t that just roll off the tongue?).

Most of the lessons were created for powerplants: trainings on equipment, OSHA required information, safety modules, etc.

Due to the nature of the content, working in a multi-disciplinary way was paramount, as we relied on Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) to make sure that information was accurate and they depended on us to make sure that the content was clearly communicated.

Working there I made lessons using a number of systems and methodologies including Xyleme – both as an Learning Content Management System (LCMS) and authoring tool, Articulate Storyline, and Adobe Captivate,

Beyond conveying the information, I strived to make content more dynamic and engaging – in many cases adding additional technologies to improve the final training product.

In one case I worked with a colleague to create a training scenario in Unreal Tournament that went into the LCMS. Other ways we ‘shoehorned’ higher-end technology into the system were creating a mock emergency event in Unity, using HTML5 for custom interactions, and using 3D models created in-house and hosted in Sketchfab.

One of the more challenging projects technically was a coordinated effort to update content in legacy products created over 25 years earlier with Macromedia Flash/Shockwave. We had to research software to find a product (Sothink SWF Decompiler) that would ‘crack’ open the old .swf files so that we could convert them into html5 files. From there we had to re-organize the files and rebuild the lessons in newer tools, often needing to find newer photos/media – as the antiquated clothing and mullet/teased hairstyles made the lessons seem incredibly dated.

A more common challenge that I faced regularly was updating content into new languages. The localization process could be fairly straightforward, but occasionally became complex when translating into a language where the characters were wildly different than English – such as Mandarin. In these cases the base lesson would sometimes need to be altered so that the format would support the change in physical space that the characters took up.