Introduction
One of the brass rings of eLearning has been the idea of reusable content to create derivative works. One of the central ideas of eLearning standards such as AICC and SCORM, for example, is the idea of a “shareable content object” (SCO) that can be used as an independent learning asset, separated from the presentation of the learning itself. In brief, by a “learning asset” we mean a discrete resource used as part of the learning ecosystem: for example, a course reading, a narrative bit of text written by the instructor explaining an idea, a course lecture, an interactive “widget”, an assignment, a mastery question or a series of mastery questions, or all or part of a quiz might each be considered a learning asset. The individual learning assets, in theory, can be used flexibly in a variety of presentation models, such as in a course web site, in an online book, or in an online game, in a semi-flexible manner. Online repositories such as MERLOT and more recent entries into the market such as SOPHIA and the much-touted Khan Academy are, arguably, based upon this premise: that individual, discrete lessons can be used flexibly and nimbly as an integrated part of a broader curriculum in a variety of ways, in a variety of presentation formats, from synchronous face-to-face courses to fully online, asynchronous learning environments (Crisp, et. al, 2003).
As part of the eLearning initiative at the University of Minnesota College of Pharmacy launched in 2010, we developed advanced electives for students across the health-care curriculum including those in PharmD, medicine, nursing, dentistry, veterinary medicine, and public health. The team determined early that we would use a modular design approach focused on discrete learning assets that could be sequenced contextually within the course, but that could also stand somewhat independently, as described above. The goal was to create a robust instructional ecosystem to meet the teaching needs of faculty and the learning needs of students that could work within our learning management system (Moodle), but that would also be able to reformulate in a variety of new future formats to provide additional learning formats, such as eBooks, for students in a quick, efficient way. Details of the design approach are outlined below.
Design Sensitivities
As the team began to engage faculty in the process of designing their courses, we determined early a set of shared design sensitivities, some of which included the following:
- minimize intrinsic cognitive load (Schnotz and Kurschner, 2010; van Merriënboer and Sweller, 2005), both for instructors during the production cycle and for students during the teaching of the course (Goldstein, 2010);
- design with modularity in mind; we operationalized this with two basic sensitivities:
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- create assets that were developed to be technologically “agnostic,” or deliverable to learners using standardized web-based protocols and technologies, AND
- keep learning assets “chunked” into discrete conceptual units, tying them together contextually during lesson sequencing rather than nesting context within a given learning asset;
- create high-quality learning assets, using cutting edge methodologies and innovative tools when possible;
- develop in a rapid-development, low-cost production metaphor;
- produce highly-accessible course materials focused using principles of Universal Design for Learning (UDL);
- use administrative resources for production and development work, and keep faculty subject matter experts focused on designing the course using vetted instructional design methodologies, emphasizing consistent mapping back to learning goals for the course (Anderson, et al., 2000).
Overall, the team articulated a broad goal of being able to create a development environment for online learning where faculty could dream big about how to teach effectively to achieve their learning goals, and our support team could find innovative ways to use cutting-edge tools to help power those faculty dreams and better meet individual learners’ needs.
Challenges to Developing Online Learning and the Three-Phased Design Process
Our historical experience within our instructional design team, as well as our experience in developing these specific courses for the College of Pharmacy, has borne out a simple truth of instructional design that was somewhat in conflict with our stated goals: that while faculty may have big plans and dreams for their courses, the difficult work of creating “version 1” of an online course is truly in the details of building the basic learning assets of a course. “Dreaming big” often falls by the wayside as the need to do more nuts and bolts instructional construction work takes precedent. The types of activities that often require more immediate attention in the initial construction of a new online course include, but aren’t necessarily limited to, thoughtfully articulating learning goals, identifying and constructing some of the core learning activities such as course readings, students’ projects, assessments, and assignments, creating thorough rubrics, creating well-designed and executed lectures, writing well-articulated quiz and exam questions, and ensuring that all of these items are designed, developed, executed, sequenced, mapped and aligned back to the original learning goals. This process is often foreign to instructors and doing just the basic work of helping to design and create basic learning assets, such as a course lecture, that is well-designed and can be delivered online, can be a difficult challenge for a faculty member not used to teaching online. Asking the instructor, as part of that process, to begin thinking about advanced interactive learning assets, such as interactive multimedia or games, we have found is often a bridge too far, at least in the initial design and delivery of the course.
Realizing this, we decided to have a three-phased instructional design process. The first phase would be to design, create and deliver the basic course structure with the types of assets that the instructor was most organically drawn to (in our case, this was often course readings, lectures, writing exercises/reflective papers, quizzes, and exams), ensuring that good online design principles were adhered to as part of this process, and carefully aligning all of these activities to the course learning goals. If we could do this effectively using the course LMS (Moodle) as a delivery platform, we would consider version 1.0 of the course a success, at least instructionally.
Phase two of the instructional design process would be the initial offering of the course. The instructional designer stayed active in the delivery of version 1.0 of the course, collaborating directly with faculty and students to redesign problematic assignments and assessments formatively. The side benefit of this “side-by-side” teaching process was that instructional designers could use the delivery of the course as an opportunity for faculty development, guiding the instructor in the teaching and delivery of the course to help her or him understand the nuances of teaching in an online environment.
The third and final phase of our design process came after the initial offering of the course. We have found that in the design and delivery of the first offering of a course, instructors begin to learn and understand the possibilities available to them far better than they ever would if we simply lectured at them. Not only do they become better teachers through this process, but they also begin to “dream big” again, and to understand what would be involved in the process of executing on those big dreams. That being said, if we’ve done our jobs successfully in the first phase of the process, the basic learning goals, as well as the basic “narrative” of the course, will often not change appreciably. Specific assignments, activities, and delivery models may evolve significantly, as the instructor better understands the art of the possible, but the overall learning goals of the course often remain intact. The hard work of designing a well-structured course in phase one sets us up for an easy deuce of derivative works in phase 3. Below we provide two examples of this: translating a course quiz into an RPG game and creating a course eTextbook from the course LMS web site.
Assessment Through Gaming: Rapid Development WYSIWYG RPGs
Educational gaming has the potential for a host of constructive outcomes, including (but not necessarily limited to), affordances that allow instructors to scaffold the process of learning, to scale mastery and “level-up” in a self-paced way for learners, to provide ongoing, continuous feedback, to motivate students to learn by increasing time on task (or, as we like to think of it, focused, protracted mental effort), to allow an “infinitely patient” tutor for learners, and to promote both a mastery and a performance goal orientation among learner players (Summit on Educational Gaming, 2006, (1, 2). Until recently, however, the boutique technical and design skills required to develop games of any appreciable complexity have kept them largely beyond the reach of standard instructional designers and faculty (Higdon, et. al, 2009). The advent of the design methods such as “gamification”, or using gaming sensitivities and design principles in a range of learning activities that would not traditionally be considered a game (see, for example, Meister, 2012) as well as the introduction of a range of rapid development WYSIWYG development tools for constructing more traditional games, such as role-playing games (RPGs), has made the idea of gaming more realistic and increasingly within the reach of everyone.
As part of a course titled “Fundamentals of Pharmacotherapy” PHAR 3700, we worked with the instructor, Dr. Amy Pittenger, to translate a traditional quiz into a role-playing game (RPG) using the Thinking Worlds development platform. The Thinking Worlds platform comes with several nice affordances, including a series of standard locations (including a hospital and a library), stock characters (including doctors, nurses, and other health care professionals), and a range of stock objects in their libraries, allowing developers to move quickly to create scenarios and characters without the expense of hiring 3-D graphics designers and programmers. The environment allows for WYSIWYG programming, making the generation and scoring of basic interactions among game characters and the learner player fast and easy for novices with little to no programming background.
During game-play, learner players in our game are required to conduct an interview about a patient with a health care professional in a HIPAA-compliant way, successfully diagnose the patient based on the identified symptoms, prescribe an over-the-counter medication to treat the diagnosis, research the diagnosed disease state in the medical library, and provide a patient-consult indicating dosing recommendations and letting the patient know about possible side effects and how and when to follow up with the doctor (see Figures 1 - 3).
Figure 1: A request for information not compliant with HIPAA gets a strong rebuke from the attending physician.
Figure 2: Diagnosing the patient is critical step in the game, as well as a learning goal for the instructor.
Figure 3: Researching medication therapies and possible side effects at the Medical Library allows learners to demonstrate an ability to conduct additional research on their own.
The game has a series of elegant benefits over a traditional quizzing environment. First, we are able to provide just-in-time feedback on student responses, guiding them immediately when they offer correct or incorrect responses. In our game, the students are graded based on their initial responses, and then offered the option to change their responses (or not) based on dialogic clues from the game characters. They don’t realize this, but we offer them partial credit for a second “right guess.” Through dialogue with the game characters, we offer students scaffolded, soft feedback guiding them to consider their previous response without giving them the correct answer. Second, while we do score (and record, via SCORM integration, their score in the Moodle gradebook), learners are welcome to play the game multiple times, trying multiple paths to completion, exploring different learning pathways. We have considered creating multiple versions of the game, allowing learners to play in novice or expert modes to level up and down the amount of feedback they receive. Those choosing to play in expert mode could receive extra credit, or might be penalized less harshly for wrong answers.
We have not yet used the game in a class, but the plan is to do so beginning fall of 2012. We will perform an evaluation of the game as a learning tool at that time. However, in terms of development, we can report that, using the well-crafted quizzing tool that Dr. Pittenger had already developed for this purpose, we were able to develop the game very quickly and at a very low-cost threshold. We were able to develop the entire game in approximately 30 hours using almost entirely undergraduate development resources, making the total production cost for the game around $300. We believe this model holds great promise for the future, both in this development environment and in others.
Ultimately, we believe that it was the careful work of instructional design and scaffolding that Dr. Pittenger had invested in during the development of the original assessment that enabled us so fluidly to translate her online quiz into a game scenario. By carefully structuring the questions to build one upon the next, a narrative began to emerge quickly that would allow the individual multiple choice questions to become dialogic options in the RPG.
This particular development environment has some obvious and non-trivial limitations. First, development is Windows-only, and we have found that the development doesn’t work properly on Windows running on an Apple computer. Similarly, game play works best on a Windows-based machine; while there is an iPad export option, several key features, including SCORM integration, are lost in this version of the game. No Apple player for desktops/laptops is available as yet, and the Thinking Worlds feature roadmap does not include this. To address these platform issues, we will likely offer learners the option of playing the game or taking a traditional quiz in the near-term. Longer-term, we will continue to evaluate other development environments to determine ways of delivering in a more platform-neutral model.
iBooks and eBooks: The next generation course “site”
Experience tells us that faculty and students frequently find learning management systems, such as Moodle, to be overly restrictive and to constrain their ability to create the type of immersive, interactive experience that they envision for their courses. This makes intuitive sense; as researchers, our faculty are often drawn to more narrative forms of knowledge-sharing, such as academic papers and books. With the advent of rapid development environments in eBooks, we have begun to look to ways in which some of the work that has, or might be, done in the development of course materials in an LMS might be delivered in a more narrative eBook format for our students.
To pilot a proof of concept in this space, we looked to our eLearning courses, as they are often the courses in which the most thoughtful instructional design and the most thorough production work has already been invested. We determined, initially, to focus on development in iBooks Author because of the ubiquity of the iPad among our student body and because of the media-rich nature of the development and delivery ecosystem. The limitations of this decision were that the output iBooks would only play on an iPad.
Two courses specifically stood out as being well-structured for this type of delivery: a course in Pharmacogenomics, which focused on personalized medicine based on an individual’s esoteric genetic makeup, and a course in Clinical Toxinology, which focused on the diagnosis and treatment of venomous and toxinologic snake bites, spider bites, and scorpion stings. We believed that the instructional methods for these courses lent themselves to the iBooks format for several key reasons:
- They were media rich -- the instructors had worked with our development team to create a number of short, conceptually-discrete, HD-quality course lectures which presented well on the iPad in HTML 5 format;
- They were sequenced thoughtfully and the instructors had spent the time to develop text-based, narrative context bridging the individual mini-lectures; and
- They were rich in self-assessment questions that followed all or nearly all of the course mini-lectures, including multiple choice questions and open-ended, free-text questions, providing learners opportunity for mastery-focused feedback as they progressed through the course site/book.
Using the iBooks author environment, we set about creating these two pilot books (see figures 4 - 7). Because our instructional designers had spent the time working with our faculty to create well-structured course assets, such as high-quality lectures in our studios and mastery-based “self-check” assessments that followed each lecture, we found that a clear and coherent narrative began to write itself. These books each took about 30 hours to produce and were created, with the exception of some guidance from the instructional design and development team, entirely by a student worker. All told, each book cost less than $1000 to produce, and now that the process is established and we have created a style guide and a series of templates for use in our iBooks development, we expect that future development should be significantly cheaper.
Figure 4: Navigating the Clinical Toxinology eText with a finger.
Figure 5: The HD-quality lectures that were previously captured for our online course and displayed in Moodle were beautiful as HTML 5 video on the iPad.
Figure 6: The iBooks authoring environment made it trivial to create beautiful chapters out of our Moodle lessons.
Figure 7: Using Hype, an HTML 5 WYSIWYG editor, we were able to translate our free-response questions from our Moodle sites into the iBooks environment as .wdgt files.
There are obvious limitations to this approach, the most notable being that the books can only be viewed on an iPad. We are currently looking into two additional development platforms, Sigil and WordPress, which are more platform-neutral and which each have various benefits and limitations of their own. However, we are encouraged by our initial forays into this space, and by the facility with which we were able to create more interesting, derivative works based on the heavy lifting of the initial instructional design and production efforts that we made early in the process.
We have only shared the books with a limited number of students, but response has, to date, been overwhelmingly positive. Students seem excited by the idea of having an eBook version of their course materials that they can take with them to review offline, as well as to have for posterity. Faculty are cautious, as they have legitimate intellectual property concerns but on the whole seem extremely enthusiastic about the potential. The questions are now shifting from “can we” to “how will we”?
Conclusions
The idea of sharable content objects and derivative works has been discussed for years, but in our experience, it has remained an elusive goal for most instructional designers. We believe that a convergence is nearing when good instructional design and standards-based production models will begin to serve us well by allowing us to be nimble and responsive to the quickening changes occurring in the technological landscape. As learners bring new computing metaphors with them, the basics of how people learn will not change; humans have evolved to learn through focus and protracted mental effort, and we don’t believe that that basic truth of human learning is likely to change any time soon. What will continue to change quickly is how learners choose to “consume” their learning and learner expectations for utilizing new types of devices and computing metaphors to make learning work for them personally. The effort that we invest in putting together well-crafted instructional assets can, we believe, pay rich dividends in allowing us to remain nimble in utilizing emerging technical metaphors while still engaging learners in the hard work of learning.
