Work Portfolio | Learning Experience Design
The Promise of Genes
(Sunway University)

Designing from scratch

I worked with the SME, Prof Abhi from the beginning of the course. I helped him to design the learning outcomes based on the pedagogy and learning style that would suit the online education.

The course was developed slowly and Prof Abhi was writing and building the content, while I designed the structure of the course, suggesting the parts of content that should be turned into graphics, diagrams, stories, videos and different types of activities to engage learners’ learning.

Below is some examples of some content and activities developed:

Below is one of the content that I suggested to be turned into a video, this video is designed by a graphic designer and the content provided by the SME.

Grabbing The Learners’ Attention

Below is the first page of the course.

The first page of all my courses were designed to grab the learners’ attention. Everything counts - from the title, the images, language tone, types of content to the activity.

Everything is crucial!

Samples of students' sharing:

Catering for two levels of students:

The Beginner & The Advanced

The SME wanted for this course to open both for the public (zero medical background) and his medical students. Which means, the content and activities have to consist of basic and advanced knowledge.

How do you do this in one course?

Lucky for me, openlearning.com is a great platform that has a variety of settings and tools. The platform’s progress tracking allows us to select activities/content it tracked. Meaning that students don’t have to complete these selected activities to progress.

It also offers some gamification features, one of them is Badges. You can award students with a badge for some tasks done (comments, likes, completing a page etc).

My solution to this problem was creating the 'Rev Up' activities. These activities/ content are put on a separate page linked to the main lesson page. On these pages, advanced activities are laid out. Students can participate in these activities and earn a set of badges. They will have to collect all of these badges to get to a superior level.

So the activities for the public were easy and suits the beginner level (students who have no background in medic or genetic studies) and the activities on the Rev Up pages dived deeper into the topic and were more complex. Anyone can access these pages, but don’t need to complete the activities to get progress in the course.

Problem solved!

My Rev Up activity icon that I created:

Below is a sample of a Rev Up activity. Can you see that it is for advanced learners?

But this activity is open to everyone to try to answer, anyone who has the knowledge and would like to take the challenge, they can.

Two Blades Sword:

Achieving Two Things in One Course

From the beginning, we decided that in the final activity, we wanted the students to go out and spread their awareness or even better, educate people.

So we built the LO to aimed at two things:

The first part of the course:

learning about genes, diseases, lifestyle, environment and the barriers in promoting good health.

The second part of the course:

learn to communicate to a targeted audience on how knowledge of genes is improving our understanding of diseases and the management of diseases.

Any Learning Designer would know that this is quite challenging especially to flow the content smoothly and how to get them to jump from the first part to the second.

To help ease the transition, the activities in the course moved into a lot of discussion towards the end module. This is to encourage ideas-building and awareness to educate.

Below is a sample of a discussion learners can participate in:

In the last module, students are guided to create their own pitch/talk - from building their content to presenting it. The selection of topic and presentation mode is completely up to the students, it was done this way to create a safe and ownership feel for the students.

The final project:

The Course Looks Interesting?

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Click below to join the course: The Promise of Genes

Would you like to create a course just like this?

Contact me at:

shaliza@shalbegin.com

+601132603026

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