OceanID Productions

Thank you for visiting OceanID Productions, LLC. Oceanid Productions is a woman-owned, minority- owned business in the Fairfax, Virginia area. I, Gina M.L. McDaniel, am the sole proprietor of this business. I started this company back in 2008 in order to further a client relationship.

I specialize in eLearning and Rapid eLearning design. I am a highly technical person, with over a decade of IT experience. I began my career as a web developer, but I always had a passion for teaching people about new technologies. I love learning and sharing my knowledge with others.

After many years doing web design I got the opportunity to redesign a set of training modules for a government agency so that they were more user friendly, more engaging, and Section 508 compliant. The training was on a financial system that was hosted in New Orleans. After a few months, hurricane season was in full swing, and Hurricane Katrina caused a massive system shut down. The hosting was moved to higher ground, and every warm body in the organization was thrown at the help desk in order to get all of the financials in order before the fiscal year ended and all the use or lose contract money was reallocated. Being an "expert" in the system from working on the training, I sat on the front lines helping users navigate the system as effectively as possible. It was a crash course in how to work a case study.

The experience taught me much about the system, but much more about the users and their needs. The holes in the training were apparent and easily documented through the help desk calls. After the fiscal year completed, I returned to the training modules with new ideas and approaches for giving the users what they really needed. After that experience, I knew that instructional design is what I was meant to do.

The owner is a member of the DC Chapter of ASTD.

Fun Fact: The company name can be said two ways:

• Ocean I.D. - signifying deep instructional design that is as creative and varied as the ocean
• Oh-See-Ah-Nid - the name of a group of demi-goddesses/half titans who guard over water features in Greek Mythology. For more information, see the Wikipedia entry.

Originally, the latter pronunciation was the originally intended name of the organization. The former is a happy accident that brilliantly coincides with the function of the business.