A national course on policing and disability
Seven modules, five contracted weeks, and a lot of people with a say in the content. The catch came on paper.
1. Who they were and what they already had
National disability advocacy, 7 modules
A national disability advocacy organization, with a center inside it that works on criminal justice. They train police officers.
They had seven modules of curriculum already written, as slide decks and instructor guides, in use. This was never a build from zero. They had wanted it online for years and it had never happened.
2. What was in the way
There was a funder deadline they couldn’t move, and the contract ran five weeks.
Five weeks isn’t enough time for seven modules. I said so in the agreement instead of afterward. It’s in the wording: what landed on that date would be a complete first version, with revision rounds still to run. Everybody signed knowing it.
Then there’s the subject. This is a course about what a police officer does when the person in front of them has a disability. A wrong detail here isn’t a typo. It is a wrong instruction given to somebody who is going to act on it.
And a lot of people had a say. The program manager who owned it and a senior director above her. A university researcher who had built the evaluation. A serving officer, for the law enforcement read. An attorney, for the module about the law. A specialist at another organization, for one specific disability. Finance and grants. A chief operating officer to sign.
Every one of those people was right to be on the list. That’s what made it hard.
The weekly status call was 30 minutes. The senior director asked to move it to a full hour so we could walk a module line by line, and we did that for weeks.
3. How the Structured Build ran on it
The storyboard for module 3 went out on a Wednesday. The build of that module shipped a week later. In between, while the whole thing was still text on a page, the senior director sent one scenario out. It went to a specialist in fetal alcohol spectrum disorder at another organization.
What came back changed the answer key.
She wrote that people with FASD will often pick whichever option they heard last. Offer somebody A or B and you tend to get B. Ask the same question with the order flipped and you tend to get A. So a scenario that hands a witness a list of choices isn’t testing what the person who wrote it thinks it’s testing. Her fix was to ask again in reverse and see whether the answer holds.
That scenario was a branching interaction. The right path, the wrong paths and the feedback sitting under each one all keyed off a question that turned out to be measuring the wrong thing. On paper it was a text edit. After the build it would have meant rebuilding the interaction and every feedback layer under it.
She flagged one more thing the scenario didn’t have at all. People with FASD often want to please an authority figure, and want to feel liked and included. In an interview with a police officer, that changes what you’re watching for. It went in.
There was a second catch, smaller. A module got renamed on paper. It had been the one that defined disability. It became the one about recognizing disability and responding to it, which is a change in what the module is for. By the time the officer reviewing the course raised the same point at build stage, it was already done.
Then the cutting, and this time it came out of my own scope. My proposal had 28 to 35 interactive videos in it, four or five per module. On the scoping call the program manager took them out. What they wanted was their written content turned into an interactive course, with one intro video that needed narration. Their own videographer shot the interview footage. That was a large piece of my own contract gone before the contract had even started, and she was right to do it.
Late on, two modules were too big for their LMS to accept. I compressed the media and moved the video out of packaged files and into streamed embeds.
4. What shipped
Seven modules in Rise 360 with Storyline interactions, contracted at 30 minutes each, packaged as SCORM and deployed in their LMS.
A pre-assessment and a post-assessment, and a knowledge check inside every module, all built from the evaluation instrument the university researcher wrote. Scenario-based case studies. Captioned video. A completion certificate carrying the center’s branding. Locked sequential navigation, so nobody skips ahead. A written guide for getting users into the LMS. Three feedback logs. Every source file.
5. What it produced
A course about disability, made for an organization whose whole job is disability, has to work for the people it is about.
I wrote an accessibility checklist for it in week 4. Alt text, color contrast, tap targets big enough to hit. Captions and transcripts, no autoplay, keyboard operability, focus order. Feedback layers a screen reader can actually reach. Then I tested it with JAWS, going through the Storyline interactions one at a time and fixing what didn’t translate. The proposal committed to a standard. No formal audit was run on it, and I’m not going to tell you one was.
Final delivery ran months past the original date, extended by agreement, with everybody clear on why. Two revision rounds per module were included. They used well past that, between the hour-long walkthroughs, a full round of testing in the LMS, and more edits months after the project closed. I did those.
They are now taking the course through certification for law enforcement training. I supplied the rubric for it during the build.
There are no enrollment numbers in the record.
6. What she said
“What started as a complex and somewhat messy concept was transformed into a structured, high-quality learning experience that we’re genuinely proud to launch.”
Program manager for disability and justice initiatives, national disability advocacy organization