Designing the Athletico Workers' Comp Learning Series

Good content is not the same as good training

Athletico's workers' compensation expertise already existed in writing. It lived across marketing pages and clinical blog posts, along with one customer case study. That material explains services well, yet it teaches almost nothing on its own, because a reader can finish it and still not know what to do differently on Monday.

I set a single goal for the project: convert Athletico's published material into learning that moves behavior. Every figure and example in the courses traces back to Athletico's own source content. I added instructional structure, plus the practice and assessment that turn reading into doing. I did not add facts.

One body of content, three different jobs

The source material serves three audiences whose work looks nothing alike. A front-desk coordinator recommending a service, a sales representative pitching prevention, and a manager supporting a recovering employee need different knowledge and different practice. Bundling them into one course would have shortchanged all three. I split the content into three role-based courses instead, each with its own behavior goal.

The choices behind the courses

I also treated the three courses as one product. They share a type system and a layout, and a single accent color distinguishes each course, so a learner who takes more than one recognizes the series immediately.

Every lesson follows the same arc

A consistent structure lowers the learner's cognitive load, because they stop relearning the interface and spend their attention on the content. Each lesson moves from framing to practice to proof of understanding.

The progression is deliberate. Early lessons ask the learner to remember and understand. Later lessons ask them to apply, and each course ends with a capstone scenario that puts the whole arc to work before a short assessment.

How I would know it worked

The courses measure learning today and set up a path to measuring behavior. Knowledge checks act as formative assessment inside each lesson, and a five-question assessment closes every course. Because completion depends on correct answers, a completion record already means something.

• Level 1, reaction. A short confidence prompt at the end would capture whether learners feel ready to act.
• Level 2, learning. The gated checks and capstone already measure this. Score data would export cleanly to an LMS through a standard package.
• Level 3, behavior. Manager observation and claim-cycle metrics, such as time to schedule and claim duration, would tie the training to the outcomes Athletico's own material names.

Self-contained and ready for any LMS

Each course is a single self-contained web page. It needs no plugin and no server. It opens in any modern browser and saves a learner's progress on their own device. That portability means Athletico could host the courses in an LMS, on an intranet, or as a direct link, without a rebuild.

Additionally, the code/content construction can be imported into most instructional design software (Articulate, etc...) to create a multimedia learning experience using the same framework presented here.

The three courses

This is an independent instructional-design work sample. The subject-matter content and the Vulcan Materials case study derive from Athletico's own publicly available workers' compensation and Employer Solutions materials. The design, structure, assessment, and build are my own.