This project was completed for a graduate course in the winter of 2015. The guidelines for this assignment were to design an instructional module that creatively addresses an instructional objective.
Work Process
My process for completing this project was as follows:
Analysis
We were allowed to choose the audience and problem for this assignment, so I established the audience to be high school biology students and the problem to be students needing more hands-on experience learning to classify organisms by genus and species. From here, I considered the background and experience level of the audience. Although high school students may have had prior experience classifying organisms into simple categories (such as plants vs. animals, basic types of insects), they have limited experience with the classifying organisms by genus and species, which requires greater attention to detail and higher level thinking. Based on this, I determined the instructional objective was for students to be able to analyze an organism’s features to classify it by genus and species.
After identifying my learners’ needs, I considered the tasks involved in meeting the instructional objective and decided that a virtual dichotomous key would be the best way to organize the tasks for this module. Next, I researched digital tools to choose the one that would be most conducive to creating a virtual dichotomous key. I concluded that Articulate Storyline was the best tool available to meet this criteria.
Design
After my analysis was complete, I planned the branching scenarios and interactions needed to create the functionality of a virtual dichotomous key and determined the layout, graphics and text for each slide. Finally, I built out the module in Storyline and tested it to make sure the branching and interactions functioned correctly.
