Apprenticeship H2O Orientation Course

Title screen for the "Apprenticeship H2O" module. There is a "start course" button with ocean waves as a background.

Course

EDET 755 - Design and Evaluation of Information Access and Delivery

 

Context and Conditions

This artifact was created in the Summer 2022 semester. I was already familiar with Articulate, as I had created courses in this software before for this program. I decided to use it again for this course in order to practice using it and further develop my skills and knowledge.

 

Scope

This artifact was created to be used as an orientation module for my company’s new apprentices. The course goes over apprenticeship details, requirements, and company details that all new apprentices need to know. There are also interactive elements to increase participation and engagement. This course was one of multiple I created during the class, but I had the most freedom with this assignment which made it a good candidate to develop for work purposes.

 

Role

I was the instructional designer and developer for this project. My supervisor, Tara Friday, served as the SME for this project and provided me with references and materials that needed to be included in the course.

 

Instructional Design

This course familiarizes new apprentices with SCRWA’s apprenticeship program and discusses all expectations and program requirements. Articulate 360 allows for extensive interaction with the content, not only in objective testing items such as a matching quiz, but also in the discovery of the content itself. Students are required to interact with the course and manipulate items on-screen in order to reveal additional information and proceed through the lesson. The most significant challenge with creating this course was identifying proper pacing of material and developing the sequencing, which was ultimately conducted as learning related sequencing (Morrison et al., 2019). Learning related sequencing is one of the three Posner and Strike sequencing schemes, and sequences content based on “five student-learning concepts” gathered from your learner analysis (Morrison et al., 2019, p. 130). These five concepts include identifiable prerequisites, familiarity, difficulty, interest, and development (Morrison et al., 2019). Since the target audience would be high school graduates with varying degrees of familiarity with the water industry, most of the sequencing for this course was based on difficulty and development, which call for sequencing content from least to most difficult as well as ensuring students’ understanding of basics before requiring higher-order comprehension (Morrison et al., 2019).


This course underwent all stages of the ADDIE model during its design and completion in a cyclical process (“Addie Model,” 2018). This project included intensive design and development phases as well as several rounds of editing in order to achieve the highest quality course possible. 

 

Related Performance Indicator

This course fulfills the requirements for AECT Standard #3 - Learning Environments (AECT, 2012). The Standard 3 indicators that the project fulfills includes creating, using, managing, ethics and diversity of learners. The course was created using research and best practices in order to maximize engagement, interest, and retention while minimizing unnecessary cognitive load. The cloud-based platform of Rise360 (an extension of Articulate) provides an avenue for the technology to be maintained and accessed across different devices. Content is delivered in several different methods and formats in order to appeal to and assist all types of learners.

 

Reflection

I feel like I experienced one of my largest or most pronounced periods of growth while working on this project. This course was the longest and most detailed one I had built yet in this program, and was the first that required me to adapt content from an existing lesson plan instead of writing content from scratch. Creating my own courses from scratch previously was beneficial, but it was also important to experience adapting someone else’s content into elearning. I pulled the content of this course from several different sources, including an apprenticeship handbook, program standards, powerpoints, and personal interviews. Due to the course being created for work, I was able to have it reviewed several times and continue work on it outside of the scope of the class. This helped me experience several rounds of the editing process and better learn how to adapt my work into a deliverable that was effective for my client’s needs. I learned a lot about Articulate development and believe that my content organization, pacing, and delivery improved from my last Articulate project to this one.