Business Fundamentals for Tree Care Businesses
Course Description:
In the Business Fundamentals for Tree Care Businesses course, you will learn the fundamentals of running an efficient tree care business. You will learn the basics of:
· Tree Care Business Administration
· Business Structures and Planning
· Business Ethics and Professional Standards
· Insurance, Risk Management, and Legal Exposure
· Recordkeeping and Technology Tools
· Regulations
· Core Business Functions
Upon successful completion of the program, you will receive a certificate demonstrating your ability to retain valuable industry knowledge.
Audience:
This course is for small tree care business owners.
A story we hear often goes like this: An arborist starts a local tree care business with “just a couple guys and a truck”. Then the business takes off, and they have to hire more employees, and things start to feel “a little too real”. Usually, at this point, a family member or spouse will quit their job to help manage the business side of things, with no experience.
That is who we had in mind when creating this new business series. This course is the first in our Business Academy series.
Financial Management course coming soon!
Responsibilities:
Working with SME’s to create learning objectives, researching the subjects, writing the content, creating assessment questions, designing and building the course.
Tools Used:
Genially, Adobe Premier Pro, Adobe Photoshop, Canva, H5P, Brightspace, Youtube, Murf, Copilot
My Process:
Once all of my learning objectives were covered, I moved all the notes in Word docs, one for each chapter. This is where I started organizing what to keep, what was duplicated (in different words), and what was too in the weeds for this course. Once the information was narrowed down, organized by the page it will live on, it was time to write the content. I created a separate Word doc for each chapter, where I used the notes to write the content that would go in the course.
I used this “written content” document to create assessment questions, connected to each learning objective. I originally did this using Copilot, but had to rewrite each of them due to the fact that the answers were easily predictable. Then I made my design sheets. I do this in Microsoft Word. I put all of the text and images here and get the “readability statistics” from Word. I take a screenshot of this to keep at the bottom of the page. I use the comment tool in Word to add details such as font/header sizes, layout plans, interactivity plans, and videos I want to make.
Once I have built the course in Brightspace and have the award, gradebooks, etc, set up, I reviewed my course. Once I was satisfied with how it looks and functions, I had my team review it, as well as a couple subject matter experts to provide feedback.
For this course, I worked with subject matter experts to come up with learning objectives and topics, which I then organized into chapters. I gathered information on each subject from (many) online courses on Open Sesame, and handouts and PDFs from our Accreditation and Apprenticeship programs.
I created a storyboard using the Whiteboard option in Canva.
This storyboard was just all of my notes from all of my resources, dropped onto the whiteboard, then color-coded to make the learning objectives of each chapter, so I knew everything was covered. I used this to also plan what information would be on each page within the chapters.