The brief.
In this assignment, we needed to choose a method to deliver content appropriate to our own learning environment. The online unit needed to be completely incorporated, without attached a myriad of downloads. The pages needed to load within the environment. It needed to include multimedia content like digital stories, game-based content, or augmented reality. The main idea is that the design had to include unique and interactive multimedia to convey our unit content while considering student needs. Finally, we needed to ensure that we designed opportunities for students to communicate with each other, whether all together as a class, or in smaller collaborative groups.
Unit 1 is a unit about storytelling and narrative structure in new media. The unit has been organized with an outer narrative guiding the students through the content. Such a narrative can be used by the students if the teacher chooses to run the content off of Zoom asynchronously, if they miss a class, or by the teacher in class (synchronously) to create flow. Each lesson has been designed using the narrative structure it is instructing on. Learning how to make a choose your own adventure story? The lesson content is in a choose your own adventure format. Very meta.
The explainer video.
Click on the video below to view a complete walkthrough of one single lesson in the unit of learning. You’ll discover how I designed and implemented a choose your own adventure lesson using Moodle’s Lesson tool while instructing learners on what interactive fiction can look like in different media formats.
The takeaways.
The Narrative:
To keep the narrative accessible, it is there in text format as well as audio format, which also increases teacher presence (Anderson, 2008; Tobin, 2014). The outer narrative also serves as a narrative itself to create 'flow' (McErlean, 2018). I designed it to mirror the hero's journey (Gunder, 2017). Lesson 1 is the ordinary world and the call to adventure where students compare changes in storytelling in new media to past media, as well as understand the perspectives of the audience in their reactions to online viewing platforms.
Lesson 2-4 are structured to mirror the special world where our student-heroes cross the threshold into new narrative structures and experience tests and challenges in understanding new narrative structures. Finally, lesson 5 explores the return to the ordinary world where students engage in a final challenge to seize the sword (reward) and return with a narrative of their very own.
One problem I had was in keeping the visual design of the unit from appearing unwieldy given the text and audio recordings in the outer narrative. I employed a 'bubble' Moodle plugin course structure to minimize the visual clutter to only one unit at a time. However, this could have been improved further had I had administrative site access. I would have added and used a NED plugin which enables individual lesson pages within units, further streamlining the experience.
The Lessons:
Aside from lessons 1 and 5 which serve as the introduction and conclusion to the unit, the lessons have also been designed as simulated narratives. Whenever possible, the lesson formats employ interactive tools from Moodle or H5P to mirror the narrative structure students are learning about (interactive fiction, countdown, puzzle). Information is introduced and interacted with the same way an audience would if they were consuming media in each of these structures (McErlean, 2018). In some cases the narrative structures lent themselves well to lesson structures, like in the interactive fiction example where I could implement a branching narrative. Other times it was harder such as in the countdown lesson when I tried using anticipation guides to create the increasing tension but I'm not sure it was effective or evident to students.
Part of my criticism of the effectiveness of the lesson is that my lesson 'narratives' remain impositional - they follow strict rules with narrow decision making margins for students (McErlean, 2018). Something for me to work on might be understanding better how to create expressive narratives that are freer for students to roam around in but still get the information across that I need to, which would also better reflect constructivist learning theory (Powell & Kalina, 2009).
The Assessments:
Lessons 1-4 each included a formative assessment where students could practice relevant learning goals and receive peer feedback and informal instructor feedback. Lesson 3 was especially important as it acted as a practice run of the summative assessment in lesson 5, but done collaboratively. I ensured any course outcome expected of students in the summative assignment was hit on earlier in the unit so students could check (in the learning reviews) and see where and how the outcomes were met.
Lastly, something I really wished was possible, was having site permissions so I could add outcomes and use them in the activities. I ended up placing the outcomes and goals in tables as lesson or page headers or as bullet points which felt scattered and less clear than if they could exist in the course administration to be selected and placed later in the activity settings. This function normally exists in Site administration -> Advanced features -> Enable outcomes and is very helpful.
References
Anderson, T. (2008). Chapter 2: Toward a theory of online learning. In T. Anderson & F. Elloumi (Eds.), Theory and Practice of Online Learning (pp. 45-74). Athabasca University Press.
Gunder, A. (2017, February 5). Establishing online students as epic heroes: A research analysis on narrative structure of online course design and Campbell's monomyth. Medium. https://medium.com/@adesinamedia_77353/establishing-online-students-as-epic-heroes-734a29b9b1a9
McErlean, K. (2018). Interactive narrative. In Interactive narratives and transmedia storytelling: Creating immersive stories across new media platforms (pp. 120-151). New York: Routledge.
Powell, K. C., & Kalina, C. J. (2009). Cognitive and social constructivism: Developing tools for an effective classroom. Education, 130(2), 241-251.
Tobin, T. J. (2014). Increase online student retention with universal design for learning. The Quarterly Review of Distance Education 15(3), 13-24.