Online courses are different from face-to-face courses in that they require additional layers of interactivity to promote student engagement and motivation in courses. Adding interactive content in courses allows for students to access course materials in different ways and to ultimately practice the skills that students should master in a given course. Throughout my time on the Distance Education team, I have been quite successful in working with faculty to develop such interactive content. By building a strong rapport with faculty and employing an agile project management process, I garner faculty buy-in to the overall process and am able to show them that they can create these sorts of experiences in their courses for their students.
In the image above, you can see me working in concert with two faculty members and an educational technologist.Together this team worked to create a multimedia learning object for the course BMI 7810.
By working together with the faculty and educational technologist, I was able to facilitate a partnership that allowed the faculty to develop deeply meaningful and valuable learning experiences for their students. As an instructional designer, I help the faculty to complement their own context expertise with technology in order to create interactive learning experiences such as the examples detailed below.
360 INTERACTIVE VIDEO
Assistive Technology Lab
In HTHRHSC 5100: Intro to Assistive Technology, the course instructor described how he would normally bring equipment from the Assistive Technology Center at Martha Moorehouse to his face-to-face students; however, he was not sure how to replicate this experience for his online students. For this interactive video, we discussed capturing several spaces with the AT Center so that students could navigate through as if they were in the space. I helped the course instructor plan the areas to capture and demo videos to record. Ultimately, the course instructor recorded many of the videos on his own with consultation advice from myself and the Distance Education instructional media team. Click on the image below to view the 360 interactive experience or go to go.osu.edu/ATlab.
Sports Nutrition Lab
In HTHRHSC 4530: Nutrition for Fitness, the course instructor indicated that she really wanted her students to be able to see the equipment contained with the sports nutrition lab at Jameson Crane Sports Medicine Institute. Students learn about many pieces of equipment within the lab, but sometimes could not make the connection with it and the associated clinical procedures and tests. As such, we planned to shoot 360 video of the lab space and embed shorter, demo videos of the various pieces of equipment within the room. The course instructor now uses this as a resource for both her online and face-to-face students. Click on the image below to view the 360 interactive experience or go to go.osu.edu/sportsnutritionlab.
BRANCHING ACTIVITIES
Leadership Branching Activity
PHARM 7562: Design and Management of Preclinical Studies, a course in the Masters of Science in Pharmacology online program, introduces students to preclinical research with a focus on the business and management aspects of preclinical research. In the course, students learn the important role that leadership can (and does) play in the business of research. I worked with the faculty instructor and an educational technologist to develop an authentic way to engage students in high-stakes decision-making environments.
As such, we added leadership scenarios through branching activities that allowed students to understand the ramifications of the decisions that they might have to make in the real world.
We created the leadership branching scenarios with a tool called Articulate 360 to take students through five different fabricated scenarios. We placed each scenario throughout the course so that students have multiple opportunities not only to practice their decision-making skills, but also to reflect with their classmates about the choices that they made.
Below, you can view some sample slides from the branching activity, the reflection discussion board for the activity, the assignment page for the activity, and the associated rubric.
- NOTE: The following embedded item is an “interactive presentation” content type for H5P. To proceed through this presentation, use the right and left arrow icons within the window to view the content.
Application of Just Culture Branching Activity
In PHARM 8170, students partake in many different role-play exercises to prepare them for becoming a pharmacy director. Being a pharmacy director comes with a great deal of responsibility such as overseeing patient safety reports. To create this activity, I worked the faculty instructor and a member of his pharmacy, an educational technologist, and the instructional design video coordinator to produce all the videos for an interactive video branching activity.
In this activity, students must investigate a patient safety report and practice applying the Just Culture algorithm to the behavior of the staff pharmacist in this situation. In real life, handling this sort of scenario is rather delicate and can be high stakes; thus, this gives a way for students to experience the various ways they could conduct this interview and apply the Just Culture algorithm in a safe space and, ultimately, to promote learning and reflection.
Below, you can view some sample slides from the branching activity, the assignment page for the activity, and the associated rubric.
- NOTE: The following embedded item is an “interactive presentation” content type for H5P. To proceed through this presentation, use the right and left arrow icons within the window to view the content. Make sure to hover your cursor over each slide to view the associated text with each slide.
ELEARNING MODULES
Evaluating Figures and Tables
In the course BMI 7810, students compose a grant proposal—specifically in the form of an NIH F(31) grant proposal. The instructors of the course hope that the students will be able to use this proposal to either secure funding for their graduate program or for the development of a thesis proposal. As a part of grant writing, students must review the literature to survey the data relevant to their ideas. As such, students not only must be able to read and to evaluate critically the data presented in figures and tables, but also create their own.
To this end, I worked with the faculty instructors and an educational technologist to develop a whole module for the course that focused on evaluating figures and tables. This module contained a small lecture primer to the learning objects, two interactive multimedia learning objects to practice working with figures and tables, and a direct follow-up assignment to assess student ability to evaluate figures and tables. Essentially, I worked to identify the faculty needs (i.e., teaching data literacy skills). Once we identified the needs, I worked to take the idea about how to present information about figures and tables in builds to a working prototype with an educational technologist. As a team, we developed storyboards for the project, located relevant imagery and primary literature sources, and built out the fully functional learning objects to be imported into the CarmenCanvas course.
- NOTE: The following embedded item is an “interactive presentation” content type for H5P. To proceed through this presentation, use the right and left arrow icons within the window to view the content.
INTERACTIVE RESOURCES
PubMed Search Tips
In BMI 5760, the faculty instructors indicated that students often struggle with conducting searches in PubMed. When you are new to researching, even in graduate school, navigating PubMed can be a rather difficult endeavor. To begin, I reviewed the already existing static resource pages that existed in the older version of BMI 5760; however, these resources were created for a university and Utah and, thus, did not have OSU specific hints. To begin, I created a screen cast that walked through the process of conducting a PubMed search. At that time I consulted with our educational technologist to determine how to utilize the screencast. Through extensive testing, he determined to use GIFs with closed captions as that describe the steps.
Ultimately, not only did we create a new, interactive resource, but also we also created another student success resource that has been utilized in other health sciences focused courses.
View the entire PubMed Search Tips Page.
