Artefact 3: MDDE610 Group Project

MDDE610 provides participants with an opportunity to use and evaluate a variety of distance education technologies. My greatest achievement in this course was to use Articulate Storyline to develop units in an e-learning module. The module taught participants about Articulate Storyline’s features and functions, as well as its limitations. I and our team members used Articulate Storyline to create the module on Articulate Storyline! (Talk about self-referential!)

This artefact represents both the learnings I acquired around the selection, use and implementation of technologies in distance education, and around collaborating with and influencing groups. I was also able take some of the learnings from managing the group in MDDE603, and apply those lessons in order to be a better group participant and collaborative leader during this project.

I had an interest in and aptitude for technology from a young age. By the time I took MDDE610, I was already using tools like Adobe Authorware to develop courses, and Adobe Photoshop and Sound Forge to create course assets.

However, at the time of taking MDDE610 I was limited to developing courseware for the contexts which I was intimately familiar with; I lacked a method of selecting appropriate tools for new and varied contexts. The MDDE610 course enabled me to acquire several skills to systematically evaluate distance education technologies.

In Assignment 2 of MDDE610, I learned to apply the Bates & Poole SECTIONS analysis model to evaluate distance education technologies. This activity prepared me to later assess Articulate Storyline for its effectiveness as an instructional development tool. By conducting a SECTIONS analysis, I was able to identify that Storyline was an effective product for corporate learning environments. (3.3).

In Assignment 3 of MDDE610, I had an opportunity to learn to use Storyline, which at the time was an emerging platform for course development. In assignment 3, I followed some tutorials online in order to acquire some fundamental skills in Articulate Storyline; thereafter, I developed two simple learning objects (2.5). 

Click each image to try out the objects. Due to e-portfolio site limitations, you will need to click the "back" button in your browser to return to this page. 

By creating these small mockups, I came to recognize Storyline’s ease of use and confirmed its potential effectiveness in a variety of educational contexts as initially proposed in my SECTIONS analysis.

In the Group Project, I proposed:

• We create a “course” to introduce Articulate Storyline and its features for development
• Each participant be accountable for developing at least one segment of the “course”

Over a series of Skype calls and a discussion forum thread, our group discussed these points and attained consensus. My accountability was to create two modules: the first was “Why Articulate Storyline?” (the buy-in for the product), and the second was “Interactivity” (how to create interactions in Storyline). As we neared the end of the project, my role grew to include producing the introduction, integrating all the modules into one course, and publishing the content for our class.

 As mentioned earlier, I learned some fundamentals of Storyline development while creating assignment 3. Consequently I was able to take on building the more complex units “Why Articulate Storyline” and “Interactivity”. (2.5) Through our group forums and emails, I gave other participants some support on their units. 

Each of us individually worked through the Storyline tutorials, developed our content separately, and then forwarded content to the group for feedback. We also met as a team through regular touchpoints by Skype.

Our overall leadership strategy emerged organically. We held no tight governance structure; rather, each individual ultimately took on accountability (or leadership) for their pieces of the project, while accepting input from the team. In effect, without deliberately recognizing it as such, we used a distributed leadership model for our project. 

Our team used a blend of synchronous and asynchronous communication and collaboration tools, including Skype, the Moodle forums, Google Docs, and file sharing. I demonstrated to our group how to set up group chats on Skype, and set up both a hosted web server and FTP access in order to share the Storyline content with our class (5.10). 

In order to manage the problems that would emerge throughout the project, I created an issue/action item log, and solicited our team members to continually update it (4.5). This log was a key feature of our team touchpoints as it enabled us to “park” issues and address them through collaborative discussion.

Quite early on our group collaboratively decided to tackle the project by splitting our Storyline module into separate components, and allowing each team member to lead the design of each one. Our group was made up of education practitioners from a variety of sectors, including military training, secondary education, corporate training, and public education. Our group’s diversity afforded me the opportunity to collaborate with people with vastly different personalities and backgrounds (4.7). I was definitely the most "in-tune" with Storyline, having produced two products with it at that point. Consequently, I took it on myself to give some suggestions to team members around which piece of the course they may wish to build based on their apparent strengths; for example, I recommended to the art teacher (who was uncomfortable with technology) to take the simpler unit on assessments, while I recommended the music enthusiast to take the audio design portion.

Our group’s diversity also helped me to understand how this platform could fit (or not) within different environments (3.4). For example, I recognized the art teacher’s comments that her school faced infrastructure and financial challenges around implementing Storyline (6.4). The military trainer found the platform easy to learn, but was accustomed to building even more highly customized courses. The secondary school music teacher found that the audio editing capabilities were below his expectations. These outcomes aligned with SECTIONS analysis findings.

One of the instructor’s goals of the group project was to encourage class participants from outside the group to explore the technology and acquire new skill and knowledge (a form of peer teaching). Our module garnered major interest from our peers, many of whom were amazed at the content we had produced and recognized potential for applying Storyline in their contexts (4.4).

We had initially neglected to strategize how to moderate the discussion – in the absence of a moderator, I Jumped in to provide feedback. The discussion also presented an important opportunity to validate what we had learned in the course. For example, absent context, one participant recommended that Storyline could simply be replaced with a blog. Thanks to my SECTIONS analysis, I was able to recognize the different contexts served by both tools, as well as the difference in interactivity offered by both platforms (4.3). This type of discussion enabled me and our group to create learning opportunities for our peers.

Throughout the assignment, I found myself taking on additional roles, such as stitching together the modules, performing quality control, and responding to the discussion forum. I took on these roles as at the time I had the most free time of our group members.

Retrospectively, had we applied a more deliberate project management approach, we probably could have foreseen more of the activities that were required along with conducting better work estimates (e.g. combining content, quality checks, and forum moderation). That said, I am ultimately happy with our use of a distributed leadership approach, as each of us took significant personal accountability over our individual units while at the same time providing input to each other's units.  

In the time after completing MDDE610, I have made Storyline the standard platform for developing e-learning to teach moderately complex tasks to over 500 contact centre staff (3.5).