eLearning for Mecklenburg Co, NC, ABC

Jacobs, et al, was hired by Mecklenburg, Co, NC, Alcoholic Beverage Control Board (ABC) to develop a strategy for taking two in-person courses and making them elearning courses, acquiring and setting up an LMS, then managing both.

The first course, Alcohol Seller/Server Excellence Training (ASSET) required training sellers and servers of alcohol to identify possibly intoxicated individuals. While most training previously experienced consists of a list of bullet points on the characteristics, it is very difficult to identify intoxicated people just from a list of traits. We wanted to do things differently.

Instead, we hired four actors, rented a bar, and videoed the actors as they drank. Every twenty minutes, the actors were filmed providing their name and a five second story, had a breath analysis (BAC) of their intoxication level, and field sobriety tests administered. The actors were also videoed approaching the bar and ordering their drinks. The bartender was never told what their BAC was and was allowed to choose when to cut people off – she cut everyone off at .08! Then we asked her what indicators she used.

Two actors were used for the training, two actors were used for the assessment where the participant had to decide if they would serve the person and, if not, what indicators they saw.

The second elearning created is for employees of Mecklenburg ABC stores (liquor stores). It is about customer service and ABC policies, but also included a overview of intoxicated people indicators borrowed from the ASSET training.

The ASSET training required hosting on a Learning Management System that would allow upwards of 5,000 unique visitors a year. This proved to be extremely expensive for the use, so Jacobs, et al, acquired managed servers, setup cPanel hosting on our domain Miravoy.com, and now hosts Moodle instances for organizations needing unique LMS hosting and training services.

Future projects are in the works, namely a Spanish version of the ASSET project and a new elearning project which will be ASSET for Managers, which will also be duplicated in Spanish.