FLexible learning at cu case study

Course Purpose

Flexible Learning at CU is designed to be the go-to place for faculty to find the information and resources they need to adapt their courses to tackle whatever circumstances come their way. It was created specifically in response to the COVID-19 pandemic to help the faculty as they prepared their courses to be “hyflex” in Fall 2020 – a mix of in-person and online within a single course section. While this course is the primary resource for faculty, it is not the only resource. The CTL blog (FOCUS) still acts as the primary repository for information to guide faculty, and the Flexible Learning course links to the blog whenever that information needs to be incorporated so we don’t duplicate information sources and create confusion.

Table of Contents

• Project Background

• Project Overview

• User Research

• Findings and Implications

• Thumbnail Sketches

• Low-Fi Implementation

• Course Styles

• High-Fi Implementation

• Final Design

Cedarville has been using various iterations of this training course since early 2020 when the initial version of the course was completely written, designed, and released in about 24-28 hours after the news of the impending lockdown in Ohio was released in March 2020. This version of the course I created was bare-bones and served as the foundation with more information being added over the following weeks.

When it became apparent that Fall 2020 classes would not be back to “normal,” the course was redesigned to focus on flexible learning and give faculty the context they needed to prepare. This version of the course preserved some of the previous information but mostly served as a container for the new training webinars and resources produced over the summer. As a result, the course was disjointed with no clear direction or navigation between items. This was only exacerbated as CTL hosted another round of webinars January 2021, and I was tasked with adding them and the associated resources to the course.

Since this project is a redesign, I started by doing a full audit of the current course content and tagged the pieces with relevant labels to discover natural categories and groupings. From that base of data as well as discussions with instructors over the past year, I created thumbnail sketches to quickly test out various layouts before committing to the one I would produce. Because this process needed to be accomplished completely virtually, I moved straight to creating a low-fi version of the project in Canvas, during which I realized system constraints would not allow us to achieve that visual design. I went back to the drawing board and redesigned some layout and visual elements.

As I was working on the redesign process, I continued to monitor questions my department or Canvas received from instructors to ensure the training course didn’t contain gaps. I realized that instructors needed more context and guidance than we had been providing, so I built in areas to convey those types of information and wrote those pieces of copy. I then fully built each page and finalized linking and video embeds, reviewing the course again before it was rolled out to instructors.

I realized the design of the course was hampering users from finding the information they needed. I had been tasked with adding information to the course at various points and with each new addition, I struggled to identify a clear organizational method. From my review of the course, I settled on the following elements to address:

1. Resource labels were unclear. For example, instructors wanting to know about using OWLs in the classroom would need to decide whether to start looking in the Ensemble & Zoom, Classroom Technology Instructions, How Tos & Tools, or FAQ pages.

2. There was no clear navigation to jump between webinars and resources once you drilled down to a specific page.

3. All the Classroom Technology Instructions were individual documents or images in a Google Drive folder and were not clearly named. Instructions and resources for the same piece of equipment was included multiple times without clear explanation.

4. There was outdated information still included in one of the instructions pages – information about a method to record video that was no longer recommended by our department/IT.

After developing my overview and goals, I started reviewing the information I’d gathered and learned over the past year through my conversations with faculty. I reviewed notes that I’d taken from one-on-one conversations, emails I’d received, help tickets my department had received, and email summaries of questions faculty asked Canvas support.

Key Findings

1. All context clues for location had been removed in one of the redesigns, so there was no clear direction or navigation. It was difficult to return to the landing page for the course without using the back buttons or the Canvas course home page option. Users would need to return home to go down a different path to find the information they were looking for.

2. Faculty were also either unaware that information was housed in this course, or it was perceived to be a slower option to contacting the CTL directly to get their questions answered.

Implications

1. Context and clear labeling are the most important pieces to ensure users can efficiently and effectively navigate the site.

2. Instructors are in a hurry, so all content needed to be simple and easy-to-skim.

Once I finished wireframes, I started some initial testing and building inside Canvas. My design used some HTML elements that I was optimistic would work, but, due to Canvas’ restrictions, they were not able to fulfill my purpose. I went back to the drawing board and pulled inspiration from the visual design of templates I made for online courses and had used in a previous iteration of the course, using assets that were guaranteed to consistently work. I built out the rest of the course using the content I’d scraped from the previous course and rearranged to fit our new organization so I could test responsiveness and linking challenges.

For this course, I used an existing style set we developed for courses at Cedarville. These styles use the Cedarville brand colors as accents, including as background for major page headers to delineate sections. In addition, the buttons used on the home page match a button template available to instructors to use in their courses, so it is something they are familiar with.

Once layouts were confirmed to be behaving properly in Canvas, I went through and completed the “finesse” aspects for the course – adding in the introductory context sections for each page, creating all of the links to the external resources, creating the internal menus on each page as well as the “jump to top” links, and creating the main menu with custom links for the entire course.

After completing the course, I reviewed it in its entirety and evaluated whether I needed or wanted to make any changes. I was happy with how the content was now organized in a much simpler way as well as how the visual styles were applied. I gave all the content one last read-through to ensure there were no typos before publishing the course for faculty to view.

Once the course was rolled out, I continued to monitor faculty support requests through the same channels as before to ensure the revised course was fulfilling its purposes, especially with new faculty we onboarded right after the course was re- launched.