Colin Hickey

A Scenario-based eLearning Experience

This scenario-based elearning experience helps teachers and advisors make appropriate accommodations for students with disabilities. It provides teachers an effective framework for supporting students with disabilities in the classroom and it provides valuable insight for advisors to support the parents of these students. With teachers and advisors making the appropriate accommodations for these students with disabilities it will increase student engagement, student progress, and make an overall more positive learning experience.

Audience: Live Online Teachers (Grades 1-12) and Advisors

Responsibilities: Instructional Design, eLearnign Development, Graphic Design, Special Education Specialist

Tools Used: Articulate Storyline 360, Adobe Illustrator, MindMeister, Google

Problem and Solution

The client is Bridgeway Academy, a large homeschooling corporation that wanted to provide professional development opportunities to their teachers and advisors. I am the instructional and technology coach at Bridgeway Academy and I have an extensive background in special education and creating professional development opportunities. The client reached out to me because of my extensive background in special education and they felt that the students could really benefit from teachers and advisors having more training.

Unfortunately, most general education teachers do not have extensive training or education on supporting students with disabilities. Depending on the state that the general education teacher is certified in they could only have 1-3 hours of special education training. As for advisors who are not certified teachers they could have no training in supporting students with disabilities.

I recommended the scenario-based eLearning experience because it allows the teachers and advisors to work through real life classroom scenarios in a risk free environment. Furthermore, the scenario-based eLearning shows teachers and advisors the realistic outcomes for poor and exceptional accommodations made for the students; as well as an opportunity to learn the correct accommodation if the wrong one is chosen.

The client felt that the eLearning experience done post professional development session that I facilitated would be an excellent opportunity for the teachers and advisors to practice the skills they had just learned.

Action Map

On this project I was the Subject Matter Expert. I am a Certified in Special Education and have many years of experience working with students with disabilities. With so much information out there I wanted to develop a clear action map and overall goal. I wanted to boil everything down to four main actions that any teacher or advisor could use to support their student.

Then I identified four supporting actions for each action. These supporting actions the teacher or advisor could perform to make the proper accommodation for that student. The client approved the actions for the eLearning experience, and I moved forward to create the text-based storyboard.

Text-Based Storyboard

Once the action map was approved and the specific actions were defined, I moved on to developing the text-based storyboard. I first created the twenty questions with the correct responses and incorrect consequences. As the learner works their way through the scenario, each option provides three actions: a correct choice and two distractors.

If the learner chooses the correct action, they will see a positive consequence and progress in the scenario. If the wrong action is selected, the learner will be informed of the negative outcome and provided the correct action.

I pulled from my previous experience working with students with disabilities to come up with twenty different real life scenarios. I focused on creating a story that would reflect experiences that the teachers are likely to encounter.

After the completion of the text based storyboard the client reviewed it and gave me the approval to move forward to creating the visual assets.

Developing Visual Assets: Adobe Illustrator

After I received the approval of the text-based storyboard, I moved onto creating the visual assets for the scenario-based eLeanring experience. The client liked my idea of using their color scheme and font used in other professional development materials.

I used Adobe Illustrator to create custom visuals for the project. This included visuals that were full slide such as the introduction slide and main desk visual asset which you can see above. Additionally, in illustrator, I created five custom characters one of which being the Oliver visual asset which you can see below.

Throughout the scenario I created additional full slide assets to help reinforce the appropriate accommodation for the student. After showing the visual assets to the client and getting the approval to move forward I moved on to creating the interactive prototype.

Interactive Prototype: Articulate Storyline

I used Articulate Storyline 360 to create the interactive prototype for this project. I had planned out how I wanted to prototype to look and function through the visual assets and the text-based storyboard. I built out the opening screens, introductory slides, and the first questions with the correct and incorrect prompts for the prototype.

I wanted to get some feedback from my client as well as from a teacher since they would be they would be the one that would be using this scenario-based eLearning experience. I wanted to make sure that the prototype was visually apealing, that the directions were clear and easy to follow, and address any issues with the user experience.

After meeting with the client and teacher they elected to remove the grading system I had in place for the project. The client wanted the learners to be focused on the content and not their score. Another improvement that we made was to add a course mission as well as the mission of the company.

Full Development: Articulate Storyline 360 – Adobe Illustrator – Moodle

I developed the final project in Articulate Storyline 360 with the addition of Adobe illustrator and Moodle. Using Adobe Illustrator I created custom visual assets from scratch. I then built out the full scenario-based eLearning experience in Articulate Storyline 360. Once the project was complete I uploaded it and created a full Moodle course which included a 30 minute live professional development session, Nearpod presentation with linked resources, and the completed eLearning project.