The process of creating my Moodle course has been an interesting one. I started off feeling very overwhelmed. This was partially due to my lack of experience with Moodle, but was primarily due to the fact that we have no multi-week online friendly programs at the Firm. I was able to come up with a concept for assignment two but did not have to fully implement it until assignment three. I decided to combine five separate sessions that we run for our summer law students into one comprehensive onboarding program. We have discussed revamping our onboarding program in the past so I believe this will resonate with my colleagues and may have the possibility of future implementation.
The biggest challenge in designing my Risk Management Module was re-structuring the content. The materials from the live ninety-minute session consist of the Firm policies and a group activity. I figured the Firm policies would make great “readings” for the week. I didn’t want to provide a long write-up on each policy because students would then have no need to read the policies. In place of the in-class activity, I incorporated a small group discussion. The Firm has a culture of collaboration so it was important that I designed something where our students could interact with each other. Since it is the first module a small group discussion seemed like a good way to ease them into the program.
Much like my introductory module, I included navigation arrows on each page to make my course more user friendly. As Bates (2014) states in the SECTIONS model, ease of use is very important in program design. If students have to fumble through using the technology they will not reap the full benefits of the content. Further, navigation arrows incorporate Spiros concept of curation by directing student in the order in which they should review the content (2014). I tried to keep the module clean and concise. Having done most of my trial and error for assignment two, I found it quite easy to aesthetically design my Risk Management Module. The one item that confused me was setting up a group discussion forum. However, after watching a YouTube video I was able to figure it out (groups versus groupings was throwing me off).
Once I understood the nature of the digital story, I knew I wanted to discuss the role of professional development in the summer law student program. I wanted my digital story to accomplish two goals: (1) to explain why professional development matters, and (2) to provide an overview of the summer law student learning program. The main driver behind my platform decisions was the content of my digital story. My content was all plain text from either speaking notes or PowerPoint presentations we have developed. I referred to the Siemens article on evaluating media characteristics to help me determine what media to incorporate. He explained that visual graphics and diagrams help enrich learning material and audio makes the learning experience more personal (Siemens, 2003). For that reason I thought PowToon would be a good platform to use. I have used it a few times before and the graphic and audio package are both extensive and easy to use. I considered using VideoScribe but I thought it was a bit too casual and that my content would not be easy to “scribe”.
I do not see my digital story being incorporated into any of our professional development courses. Instead, I see it being part of the onboarding process for summer students, articling students, and junior associates (with slight revisions being made for each audience). The Firm has dedicated significant time and resources to the professional development of these groups. I think it is important they understand why and get an idea of what to expect. For that reason, I incorporated my digital story into my Introduction Module. I think it is a good way to set the tone for the rest of the course and the summer term at large. Going forward, I would love to include interview style clips with prior students and associates to make the story more relatable.
Overall, I really enjoyed the process of creating this course and think it will help me develop eLearning content for the Firm in the future.
References
Bates, T. (2014). Chapter 8: SECTION Framework. Teaching in digital age. Retrieved from: http://opentextbc.ca/teachinginadigitalage/
Siemens, G. (2003). Evaluating media characteristics: Using multimedia to achieve learning outcomes. Elearnspace. Retrieved from: http://www.elearnspace.org/Articles/mediacharacteristics.htm
Spiro, K. (2014). 5 elearning trends leading to the end of the Learning Management Systems. Retrieved from: http://elearningindustry.com/5-elearning-trends-leading-to-the-end-of-the-learning-management-system