E-Learning Challenge

The goal of this week’s challenge was to create a visual story using photo collages as a means of moving away from the urge to display slides and slides of bullets within your e-learning modules.

The Concept

A couple of years ago, I stumbled upon this article by the CVU, outlining the state of online university education in Canada, and it really struck a chord with me. As someone who is extremely passionate about Instructional Design and increasing accessibility, it seemed baffling that we could be lagging so far behind other countries. However, after since working for a university, I have a bit more context into the why of how things are – you can’t really force professors to put their courses online, you can only provide them with gentle encouragement. In any event, I thought it was important to disseminate the information in this report, so I did it once in a paper for graduate school, and I did it again within this challenge.

The Method

I thought an infographic-style of approach would best display the statistics I wanted to illustrate, so I downloaded and cropped the infographic elements in Adobe Illustrator, imported them into Storyline and organized them appropriately.

Then, I added a layer for every element, and applied hotspots on the base layer so that when the user hovered over each element, the appropriate statistics would display. When the user moves their mouse away from the element, the base layer returns to its original state.

While not a traditional infographic and not the most attractively organized (Hey! I’m not a graphic designer!), I was happy with the end result.

The Result

To view the complete interaction, click here.

 

Every week over at e-learning heroes, there’s a new challenge to probe participation, innovation, and creativity. This week, the challenge was to design a poster around your favourite education or instructional design quote. Previously I had been a wallflower to these weekly challenges, enjoying all of the submissions, but this week I decided to make my first submission!

This particular quote is one of my favourites because there have been many times in recent years where I’ve pondered the value of my education and whether it would ever make a difference. Time (and patience) has proven that there are folks out there who appreciate my education and that appreciation has helped me to stop and appreciate the time it took to achieve some of my goals, and motivates me to keep learning.