Water Safety on the Great Lakes
This is a self-paced, eLearning course designed to teach visitors of the Great Lakes about water safety and proper emergency responses. The course presents users with scenarios to simulate real-life experiences in a safe environment.
Audience: Visitors of the Great Lakes
Responsibilities: Instructional Design, Needs Analysis, Storyboarding, eLearning Development
Tools Used: Articulate Storyline 360, Adobe XD, Google Docs
The Problem
The number of people drowning in Michigan's Great Lakes continues to rise each year. Many are visitors that are not aware of the power of the water nor of the safety procedures to follow in the event of an emergency. Over 100 people unnecessarily lose their lives each year because of a lack of water safety knowledge.
The Solution
To address this lack of knowledge, I decided to create a scenario-based eLearning experience that helps beachgoers stay safe and react appropriately in the event of an emergency. The content would be easily accessible on any device at any time so that locals and visitors could access it from their home, hotel, or even the car. It was also important that learners could return to the course each summer to review the content. The scenarios allow the users to practice in a safe, risk-free environment.
The Process
To create this course, I first generated an analysis canvas, a design document, and a visual storyboard. I then created a prototype before developing the final course. I focused on the ADDIE model as well as Action Mapping principles while designing.
Analysis Canvas
I began by generating a needs statement for the course. Since water safety information is not taught in schools nor upon arrival to the beaches, many people have no knowledge of water safety. Without this course, more and more people will continue to lose their lives in the Great Lakes.
I then created three learner personas to represent the key features of my target audience. I focused on developing three individuals with varying ages, backgrounds, and water experience to demonstrate the variety of people that visit the Great Lakes. Creating the learner personas helped me visualize which aspects of my course would be the most important for meeting their needs.
Next, I drafted an outline of the major topics of the course and described the learning environment that would be required. Creating a course outline helped me ensure that I was only including critical information. It also helped me organize the content into three main topics. Finally, I thought through technologies that would be used for the course. It was important that the course be easily accessible since users would be in many different locations and on many different devices.
Design Document
The next step was to write a design document. This is where I chose the specific technology tools that I would use to develop the course. At this point, I also came up with the course-level and unit objectives. Following backward design, I wrote the objectives, then the assessments, and finally the learning materials. I focused on making sure that all three aligned for a cohesive and effective learning experience.
Storyboard
Later, I used Google Docs to develop a visual storyboard of one of the scenarios of the course. I chose a visual storyboard so that I could visualize mockups of the interactive components. It helped me see a general layout of the slides and helped me think through the text of the prompts and the questions. I also had to focus on writing effective and realistic feedback for each scenario response. Lastly, I wrote out which items would require animation as well as programming notes for course navigation.
Prototype
It was finally time to bring my vision to life. I created a prototype in Adobe XD, which was my first glimpse at what the project would actually look like. I wanted to make sure that the interactivity I had planned would actually function correctly and that I was pleased with the overall design before doing any further development.
Course Development
I used Articulate Storyline to develop just one scenario of the course as a sample. I worked with states, triggers, layers, and animation to create the interactive elements. It is the perfect technology to create scenario-based experiences for the learners.
The Reflection
This project showed me just how long of a process designing scenario-based learning can be. In addition to the instructional design process, I had to deal with the learning curve of Articulate Storyline. Even though it is a tricky program to master, I am impressed with how much it can do, and I look forward to developing the rest of the course with it. I love that once you set up your initial designs and triggers, it is easy to copy and paste them for subsequent uses.
I really appreciate all of the steps of the design process, because they force me to think through all of my decisions carefully and to make sure that I am happy with my work before advancing too far in the process. In the future, I would like to fully develop the course and then implement it and evaluate its success.