Artifact #1: Microcirculation Microlearning
Summary
In EDIT 6200E: Designing Interactive Learning Environments, taught by Dr. Stefaniak, my Microcirculation Microlearning, created for a professor at Noorda Osteopathic School of Medicine who wanted a more interactive lesson than his existing one, fits into this theme because it is a perfect blend of design and development. The design components involved crafting a Design Document, which outlines the learner analysis, learning goals, learning objectives, and general lesson plans, and a rough storyboard for me to map out visual and audio components on each slide. The development involved building the course within Articulate Storyline and pushing myself to learn new functionalities such as animations, as well as recording and editing audio in Audacity, sourcing medical images from open-source platforms, and creating my own simple images in Canva.
I engaged in Backward Design by building the instruction and activities based on the learning objectives, then took thorough notes from the professor about the medical specificities of the content he wanted offered. The result is a microlearning that activates previous knowledge of macrocirculation before pivoting into defining the roles of the different components of microcirculation (capillaries, venules, arterioles, etc.) and how they related to each other. This, like a few other examples, was done through interactive markers over a medical image of microcirculation. I added various animations through the course, such as movement of blood cells and vesicles through blood vessels or other cells. Multiple branches allowed learners to explore different categories (three types of capillaries, four pathways for material exchange) in their own time—a change from the videos Noorda typically uses, which puts students on a fixed pace. I added short audios recorded in Audacity to the appropriate subjects, and at the end, incorporated a short graded quiz that tested learners on the most important concepts.
While the professor was pleased with the level of interactivity in this course and did use it for a sample student population (with the students also expressing approval), I designed and developed this microlearning before I settled into my constructivist instructional design perspective. Although I have since added more opportunities for knowledge activation through pointed knowledge checks, designed to keep their learning active and engaged, in hindsight I would have created the course through a constructivist, situated learning lens from the ground up.
However, I am proud of the remodeling of the course I did after I learned significantly more about accessibility, adding accurate audio captions, writing thorough alternative text, ensuring that all interactions were navigable by keyboard and not just clicking (although one quiz question was an unavoidable drag-and-drop, unfortunately), and reorganizing each page’s focus order so potential screen readers conveyed information in the correct sequence.
Artifact #2: Building a Story — The Basics
Summary
Created in EDIT 6500E: Digital Video in Education, taught by Dr. Schmidt, This project is perhaps the most iterative of all the products in my portfolio—I repeatedly circled back and changed the direction of my design and storyboarding to fit more realistic learning objectives, and even more repeatedly re-edited the video portion once I gained more skill in video editing in general. In fact, regarding the latter portion, I shifted the entire project from Davinci Resolve to Adobe Premiere Pro, dove much deeper into the functionality of the program and ultimately ended with a significantly sleeker result.
My design portion incorporated Backward Design most prominently, in which I created learning objectives in my film treatment about the storytelling aspects I wanted my audience to take away from my video and then built the scenes around the objectives. Based on my instructor’s feedback where he noted my original vision carried more breadth of knowledge than depth, I pivoted from a course about functionally writing a story to general storytelling characteristics that were useful to know to build a story. I decided that my video, as 10 minutes was the maximum length, wouldn’t exactly help the learners sit down and bust out a novel, but it would assist them in identifying and choosing a novel plot structure, beginning to flesh out character archetypes and motivations, and discovering new angles to display worldbuilding.
Since my video was designed to be an introductory storytelling course, I knew that a prominent goal of mine was to ensnare the viewers’ attention enough for them to continue further on their storytelling learning journey. To meet this goal, I incorporated the varying dynamic shots of my whiteboard drawings (sped up as to not lose interest!), beats of humor, and a plethora of graphic designs and silly animations to keep the video light-hearted and fun. I even, though not obviously, tilted the script to target fantasy and science-fiction storytelling, as I’ve realized anecdotally through my writing experiences that this is the group most likely to watch this genre of video (the Brandon Sanderson recorded lecture series comes to mind).
My storyboard was immensely helpful, planning the shots where I was either explaining a concept in front of the camera, or filming my hands drawing out concepts on a whiteboard. I used the storyboard as more of a guideline than a strict boundary, but it allowed me to keep track of the video’s flow. The shots themselves were tricky—I had to balance my phone on various piles of materials to get the right height and distance as I recorded my hands from multiple angles. The editing was even trickier, especially with how engaging I hoped the final result would be, but I learned a ton about the technology that I will carry over into more projects.