EKU Faculty Professional Development: Summer 2016 Certificate Project
This was a little project I created for our Summer 2016 Faculty Professional Development Certificate. The EKU Instructional Design Center provides professional development training for faculty regarding online learning. This certificate is earned by participating in an 8-week course that covers elearning and how to create effective online courses. During each certificate course, each faculty member is paired up with an Instructional Designer for a creative media project. Think of it as the final project of the course, where the faculty creates a multimedia lesson with an Instructional Designer.
On my end, as an Instructional Designer, I worked with Aileen Jones, who decided to do a lesson for her psychiatric nursing courses (something that could be used in undergraduate and graduate courses). I worked with her for three weeks, from start to finish. We ended up with an interactive interview lesson where students learned about how to conduct a psychiatric interview. Psychiatric interviews cover topics that are sensitive in nature, and we made sure to point out suicide and abuse situations so students would know what to do if their patient exhibited any signs. Of course, we included diagnoses help for different disorders, including Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, Social Anxiety, General Anxiety Disorder, Depression, and Mania, among others.
See the finished project by clicking here. Continue reading to get the full details on development and production of the project.
PLANNING
I am a big believer in planning out projects beforehand, as much as possible. When I first met Aileen, we were paired up during one of the in-person meetings of the Faculty PD Certificate course. I spoke with her about her ideas and what she wanted to do with the project. Immediately, we began to brainstorm and I thought a good solution would be to create an actual interactive interview, using Storyline Articulate 2. I love that program and have a lot of experience with it, but I had not tried to integrate video in to the presentation previously. I thought the project would be a good challenge for both of us.
So, Aileen and I had a couple more meetings and I spoke with her about developing a script. She first developed a timeline of the presentation and then developed a script. The most challenging part of the process is that the video shoot occurred without me being there, as I had a conference I was required to attend. I briefed the video studio on basic setup, but in retrospect, I could have done a better job doing that.
PLANNING FILES
Click here to see the outline for the project
Click here to see the final script of the production
Click here to see a video shot listing for the video shoot
Click here to see RTF teleprompter file for Aileen
IMPLEMENTATION
With any larger project like this, you are bound to have a couple hiccups. With us, the hiccups came in the form of planning the visuals for the shots, in particular the furniture and other background elements. The video crew, Sam Williamson and David Smith, did a great job of hijacking furniture from the break room and re purposing it for an “interview” setting.
This time, I made sure the video crew was briefed on the type of setting. It was more of a therapist’s office setting, and I think it came out well.
We made sure continuity was fine regarding clothing and jewelry and I didn’t see any differences betwen the shots.
In total, we filmed a few shots. I ended up editing about 10-15 video files, usually from 1 minute to 10 minutes. The most challenging part was getting the voices to sync up correctly on my end. It was my first project actually editing the footage myself.
DESIGN
I ended up, as stated before, editing the shots and music/sound effects myself. I came up with a “notebook” design in which it looked like the student was taking notes as the therapist (Aileen) spoke with the patient (Rachael, another faculty in the psych program). I also included interactives and questions. I also included downloadable handouts for students to take from the presentation. Here are a few examples:
Ruling out other psychiatric disorders
REVIEW
After I finished the rough presentation, I showed it to Aileen for any suggestions or input. As it turned out, I wasn’t completely finished with the project as I had just returned from the conference. She liked the progress I had made so far. I used the Storyline interface in put in a navigation slider and links for each section so the student could traverse the presentation appropriately, along with NEXT and PREV buttons.
I also added some accessibility items, which included the typed notes on each scene. I am working on a way to implement true closed-captioning, but I am having a hard time with the way Articulate makes you insert them (separate trigger for each line of text — could you imagine putting each line of text in like that?!). Everything is totally customized, which I like quite a bit, but it would be a blessing to just have an overall CC functionality built in to Storyline itself.
FUTURE IMPLICATIONS
In addition to the things I learned while putting this lesson together, I also thought about future implications of such a process. We have paved the way for more complicated productions with interactive features. We can improve upon our process, but I’d say it turned out quite well for this department’s workflow. Now we know how to handle presentations like this one.
This process can also be multidisciplinary, meaning we could extend this kind of production to other disciplines that may use human interaction. Justice and Safety could be a good avenue, as could the other Health Sciences. There are third-party solutions on the health side of things, like ShadowHealth and Tina, but I feel we can do independent creative projects for our quality courses, too.
I will continue to advocate for interactive learning at EKU, and I hope it catches on.
SPECIAL THANKS
I want to thank the following individuals for their assistance during this project. I could not have done it without them!
Aileen Jones, nurse practitioner and psychiatric nurse faculty
Rachael, psychiatric nurse faculty
David Smith, EKU Online, IDC
Sam Williamson, EKU Online, IDC