Learning Technologies and Design Portfolio
I am able to design and develop innovative, aesthetic, effective and sustainable learning technologies based on theory-grounded research.
To provide students with experiences to develop theory-grounded and research-based competencies for the innovative, aesthetic, effective and sustainable design/development and management of technologies for learning opportunities and systems.
Students are able to design/develop learning opportunities and systems for meaningful learning; promote student engagement in online learning environments; and select appropriate technology and learning objects to support learners.
The Final Project tab provides an introduction, practice, and interactive video quiz over a constructed response writing strategy using the acronym RACES. Students first see a racing themed digital image from created in Photoshop with an audio clip that walks users through the visual step by step. The digital image is created to be a visual anchor during subsequent guided and independent writing activities. Following is a sort using the digital image broken into pieces to challenge students to recall and order the writing strategy and to place the example sentences in the correct order. The final segment of the webpage challenges students to complete an interactive video quiz which allows for multiple attempts and immediate feedback. The video was created in Premiere Pro with narration recorded and edited in Audition. The website was created to support students in scaffolding to higher-level thinking with progressively more difficult activities with the intention they would be ready for depth-of-knowledge level 4 activities, including original composition of constructed response paragraphs, at the end of the learning activity.
While Adobe Photoshop, Audition, Premiere, and H5P were brand new to me at the time I created this learning activity, I truly pushed myself to make quality media with the intent to support motivation and engagement in the online learning environment for my students. I believe that the page and elements are designed well to meet the learning objective and present a clean design aesthetic using professional design tools that any instructor could use with little to no preparation.
I discovered that I needed to learn how to create interactive elements from scratch because the sort and video quiz for the RACES website were created in H5P which is an exceptionally easy program to use but that is cost-prohibitive for individual designers. As I would like to help non-profits with tutoring and job training, I cannot rely on expensive programs. This drove me to choose Introduction to Web Design in my next semester, hoping to learn at least some basics of HTML5.
I developed critical and analytical skills for data collection and evaluation and can reflect and apply these skills to assess and evaluate learning systems.
To provide students with experiences to develop skills in data collection, analysis and evaluation for reflecting on and applying to the design/development of learning opportunities and systems.
Students are able to conduct analysis in order to translate and use theoretical frameworks and existing research to design/develop learning opportunities and systems.
The group was interested in creating a professional development workshop for K-12 teachers that would highlight 5 digital education platforms that could be easily used to provide digital formative assessment data. The intention was to increase staff awareness, competency, and use of digital platforms for assessment in order to more immediately inform and adapt instruction, provide feedback to students, and increase student motivation and engagement. Individually, I created the Needs Assessment section, including assessment tools found in Appendix A. The needs assessment considered all stakeholders and the target audience members and what types of information would be needed from each group, the questions to ask, and the measures to use in order to guide the team in determining if district-wide training would be the right solution. If so, it would then guide the development and design of the learning. While the group determined the broad goals and a few loose objectives, I fleshed out the goals, added detail and measure to the objectives, and determined the learning targets for each objective.
I realized in this process that a full ADDIE model in design is often associated with being a greater cost to companies. However, I know that identifying all the stakeholders and considering each group carefully in the needs analysis did guide the objectives to ensure organization goals were met through making sure they were seen as valuable to the teachers and students who would actually use the platforms in learning. I believe an ADDIE or other waterfall design models are easiest with a team as our group represented in this program project. After speaking to a few independent designers, it seems the rapid design models are much more popular currently for offering tangibles much more quickly to clients to begin the feedback loop more quickly.
My greatest challenge in needs assessment was in balancing the desire to create a thorough analysis with available time and resources. While this was for a school project where I did not have actual budget and time constraints, in a real world application, I believe I would have to cut down the assessment tools and more realistically get the right people in the room for an initial meeting and ask the right questions. This exercise is all the work that should go on in a designer’s mind, like a process always running in the background, to ensure the right questions are, indeed, asked of the right people.
I developed competencies for socially responsible technology leadership.
To provide students with experiences to become socially responsible, reflective/sensitive on the interaction of technologies & society and act ethically in response to current and future challenges of emerging technologies for learning.
Students demonstrate technology leadership and knowledge of ethics as applied to current and future socio-technical context
This was my first class in the program, so I really tried to put alternate text, audio, and visual supports needed for accessibility in place. I was lucky enough to have users giving feedback who have various learning disabilities to help me improve my site in not only general usability but also accessibility. Because the learning was hosted on a webpage, I simply had to send the link to the users and make observations about their navigation, questions, and behaviors which could reveal engagement or frustration, indicating areas for improvement.
I struggled to fully understand accessibility as it was only a brief section at the very end of the course. I invested extra time to be sure I created additional article audio options, alternate text documents, and scripts available for my video, even with closed captioning. Accessibility and learning to use screen readers to test my work is an area of growth for me that I will continue to work on throughout my program.
I learned that attempting to streamline design cannot cut back on directions. In addition to clear directions, setting conditions to advance to the next activity or quiz ensures students are not tempted to click before doing the prerequisite work. My late elementary school to early middle school users skipped the step of reading the article before clicking to start the video quiz. Big takeaway--if there is a video, people will click it before reading.