Background: In February 2020 I created an accelerated learning plan for MLA's Consumer Health Information Specialization (CHIS) to respond to the pandemic.
Description: Based on my experience as an academic health sciences librarian during Hurricane Katrina, I personally knew that professional development was a way to fill the open hours made available due to a sudden move to remote work. Based on my experience as a training development specialist for a large, distributed organization, I knew the landscape of our CHIS classes, and suspected we had enough free, fully-built educational products to enable an abruptly remote library workforce to earn a CHIS specialization completely online in about a month. I also knew we had stakeholders who quickly needed to replace in-person training with "something else" before April 30th, 2020. And finally, I knew that we offered sponsorships for the CHIS application fee, making this specialization completely free to library workers. So I opened up a new spreadsheet and got to work.
Conclusion: A year later we see that the accelerated learning plan had a direct influence on our training statistics, including a 25% increase of consumer health related classes taught across the U.S. from 2019-20 (57 classes) to 2020-21 (71 classes); and an incredible 46% increase of consumer health class registrations from 2019-20 (5,775) to 2020-21 (8,422). CHIS sponsorship recipients increased 29% from 2019-20 (138) to 2020-21 (178). In retrospect, I realize now how this project was a comforting and consuming way to create order while the world was falling apart. Take the things that you have and build something new. Connections can increase health literacy.