Discover San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance Academy's Create-A-Course

By Carrie Hrvatin, Volunteer Coordinator, San Diego Zoo

Oh, what a year. Volunteer Services has been adapting since day one, yet 2020 really pushed us to make changes. Our volunteers rely on us for up-to-date information, and they want to stay informed. We had to completely rethink morning meetings, on-site training, onboarding and education classes.

We took this very tough time as an opportunity to rethink, re-create and rebrand our approach to so much of our teaching styles. Orientation and onboarding is a priority for us and has been essential over the last 12 years. In the past, we've rotated between offering weekend training and weeknight in-person training to meet those working all schedules. COVID-19 allowed us to take that same in-person orientation and look at an online—on your time—onboarding option. We coupled our Learning Pathway with Create-A-Course to put together needed tools for those interested in our volunteer opportunities.

Our volunteer onboarding PowerPoint had vital policies that needed to be emphasized for those joining our team. It was easy to go to Create-A-Course and upload that PowerPoint. We then proceeded to find a small team that would read our transcripts for each slide. We used a regular laptop, and we were able to record audio for more than 65 slides in a matter of hours. The system will translate your audio, and you can simply review and save the text for those who learn best from reading or need the text as an accommodation. We chose to copy our transcripts directly into each slide.

As we reviewed our slides, we were easily able to add in new ideas and move around the order of the content as needed. Our Volunteer Services team needed to meet on more than one occasion to complete this training, and we were still able to submit the course within two weeks.

Create-A-Course is simple, and allowed us to build in a fun quiz at the end. The quiz encouraged the new volunteers to ask themselves what they enjoyed about the training—and even better, how they are most excited to engage with our team and our guests. We found that Create-A-Course allowed us to be even more inclusive, allowing applicants to complete onboarding from home, on their own time—and, for most applicants, it is so much quicker.

Going forward, we plan to use this tool on San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance Academy to allow our team the flexibility to meet an even larger audience. We highly recommend you try Create-A-Course to help leverage your volunteer training opportunities.

If you are interested in adding the Create-A-Course course builder to your private site, please email Linda Duca at lduca@cypherworx.com.