DAVID KOBLISKA MASTERY JOURNAL Full Sail University Instructional Design & Technology M.S.

EDM533: Visual and Verbal Communication in Instructional Design

It Started with a Virtual Field Trip Infographic...

... And Became an Interactive eLearning Module Prototype

Final Reflections on the Project

From Infographic to E-Learning Module

The translation process felt very natural because I had instinctively planned for the module design while creating the infographic. In fact, the infographic was to serve a “teaser” advertisement of sorts while at the same time engaging the students who would see it. Mysterious names and empty silhouettes provided an invitation for students to begin speculating and even researching who these main characters might be that they would find on their virtual field trip.

Adobe Illustrator and XD provided the needed integration to be able to copy and paste elements directly from one tool into the other. As the eLearning module took shape, I discovered the capability of adding overlays to the static screens that could be activated by clicking an interface affordance. I chose the bright red pins as a trigger for more information. The yellow strings that crisscrossed the bulletin board in the infographic became the primary means of navigation.

Learning Science

Students are engaged by interaction with their subject matter. Here, in the absence of an actual hands-on field trip where students would be immersed in their environment, the infographic and eLearning module had to rise to the task of providing an interactive experience. By adding a fun theme, students’ imaginations could be engaged and this would add an immersive element that was otherwise impossible given the circumstances.

Cooperative learning techniques are also a proven way to increase student engagement. The index cards that follow the unmasking of each suspect provide immediate follow-up discussion points that can be handled as an entire classroom or in small groups. Students can also jot down a question they select which increases their confidence in the learning process by adding a sense of control to their learning experience. This self-guided control also permeates the interactive module which allows students to explore various locals and discover various suspects based on their own choices.

Enabling Principles

The skills I have learned that formed the foundation of my success with this project includes the following:

• choosing a motivational strategy to use in approaching an instructional design project
• developing a strong theme that heightens student expectation that the learning experience will be fun and engaging
• delivering engaging materials through lessons that contain interactivity and opportunities for students to be in control of their own learning experience
• providing students the opportunities for cooperative learning and further study

Conclusion

This month of learning essential design principles, researching visual learning principles, and working with new tools has been the most rewarding experience I have ever had as a teacher. It has built on the important foundations of mastery and research into student motivation gained through prior classes and provides an exciting launching pad for the months to come.

IDT552: CORPORATE TRAINING & MOTIVATIONAL DEVELOPMENT

Value Proposition Design presentation in Keynote

Below is a recorded presentation in Keynote which presents Value Proposition Design in my own words and images. The client is a faltering Instructional Design firm that specializes in civilian military training. The presentation is meant as a four-minute introduction to services I might provide to "train the trainer" in the V.P.D. concept.

The development of this presentation was extremely satisfying as the initial idea of using bicycle gears to illustrate client "fit" was met with an unexpected theme available in Keynote. When my instructor suggested the writing needed to be more compelling, the discovery of Andy Schleck's story of Olympic victory involving his bike chain gave me the opportunity to articulate the risks involved in a competitive market. Skills I had developed years before in unleashing Keynote's capacity for stunning visuals also allowed me to fully realize a compelling product.

Client Presentation video

The following is a 4-minute video presentation to be made to my client, Ozark Adventist Christian School. This is a real-life scenario with real people and a genuine burden I have to make a difference. This work is dedicated to Mr. Mike Dale, my Principal for the past 10 years who passed away today after battling COVID. His words to me about this mastery journey was, "Never give up!" I will miss his positive presence and influence in my life terribly. And the place where I teach Computer Science, Ozark Adventist Academy, will never be the same.

Reflection on a life spent teaching

Life is Precious

Today I learned how much it can hurt when someone dies. Our beloved principal, Mr. Mike Dale, lost his battle against COVID. He hired me 10 years ago, taking a chance that a pastor could become a teacher. He has been my most ardent supporter, raising tens of thousands of dollars for technology at the school, and pushing relentlessly for a robotics and STEM program. When I visited with him in September and told him I was taking classes at Full Sail, he said, “Never give up!” He repeated this to me later in an email. It was a miracle we got to know each other at all because he had just survived a major lung infection just before we met and has had a quarter of normal lung capacity these past 10 years. We knew if the pandemic struck him it wouldn’t be a fair fight. We labored all semester under the strictest of precautions only for him to catch it after all the students went home for Thanksgiving.

Lives You Touch

My wife and I learned of his passing as we waited in our seats for a wedding of two former students to begin. The wedding party was almost all former students of mine. Any teacher could have been invited because all of my colleagues made an impression on the bride and groom, but I was the one they invited. The smiles that greeted me at the back of the church when we arrived were on faces I hadn’t seen for years but it felt like days. Teaching changes you in ways you never expect. A few weeks ago I wrote my seventh-grade teacher on Facebook Messenger to wish him a happy birthday. On a whim I began writing important things he had changed in my life that were still with me. Just a few words, I thought. Four paragraphs later I could have kept going but decided to hit send anyway. An hour later my phone chirped. “You brought tears to my eyes,” he wrote. “God bless you.”

New Lease on Life

I loved college. I was an overachiever, a straight-A honors student, but also had a creative streak that flavored everything I did. I’ve always been that way, but I haven’t felt that way recently until this past month. Stretched and challenged like nothing I’ve experienced in years, yet cheered on by my teachers and finding wonderful contentment in weaving creativity with critical thinking. Knowing, even teaching Adobe apps, but never leaning into them, like a farmer at his plow. Exhausting work, but what a sound and peaceful sleep after finally turning projects in. Learning the value of the second draft, second thoughts, a second looking over things. Seeing things mature when pushed to process and produce like I have never been made to before. I shared with Mr. Dale about my dreams of using this degree to make a real difference in K-12 Computer Science education. He said, “You will help a lot of people!” This class has given me the tools and procedural blueprints to iterate on an idea and make it a reality, to bring it to the professional light of day and press the launch button. I am so very sorry that Mike will not see the fruits of what he so encouraged me to do. But now my dreams are closer to reality than ever before. Once again it was teachers. Teachers made this difference. I know this isn’t exactly the kind of reflection I was asked to write or planned to write. Leaving for the wedding, I knew I had left this for the end of a long day, but had no idea it would have been a day of such highs and lows. I’m spent. But I am reminded that life is short and it’s good to choose hard and meaningful work. This degree program was a gift in honor of a dedicated teacher whose life was taken by this pandemic. Now there are two such teachers who have changed my life.

Project Design Brief & Media Assets

The remaining work for IDT552, Corporate Training and Motivational Development, culminated in a Project Design Brief which featured two media assets created in Adobe Illustrator and Adobe XD.

Creating the infographic above involved statistical research and creative interpretation. I wanted to communicate both the exploding job market and something of the disparity between the attitudes of parents and administrators about equipping students to meet the demand. Of the two, the school-related information is the most immediately relevant to elementary school staff, and placing this at the top it allowed me to tell the visual story of planes flying over the high mountains of opportunity.

The above eLearning module was my second foray into Adobe's prototyping app, XD. However, this was my first attempt to frame a training solution for bringing Computer Science and Computational Thinking to the attention of our local educators. This is certainly a prototype, but I can see a style of communication through illustration emerging in the projects shared throughout this journal, and the overall experience of this course has been to greatly increase my confidence as an Instructional Designer. Quite frankly, it is the first time I have envisioned pursing this field professionally since beginning the master's program at Full Sail.

You can view more comprehensive IDT552 assignment details and feedback here.

IDT610: Filmmaking Principles for Instructional Design

Reflection Post

Reflect—How did your attitude, logic, and behaviors influence your performance or contribution? What worked? What didn’t? I have been an amateur filmmaker from a very young age and, while this didn't hurt my attitude going into the course, it did require me to adjust course on my way through. The planning document for the project was in a format that seemed odd to me having never done scene-by-scene planning of an instructional video. While I am used to thinking in terms of action sequences with multiple camera angles and a need to closely monitor continuity, I have never worried much about the instructional value of my videos. Until now. As soon as I composed the required planning documentation, I realized how useful it was to have charted out and diagrammed each shot. But it wasn't until I was in the midst of filming that I realized how much I hadn't been able to visualize beforehand. My action sequences worked well but the simple "how-to" demonstration was very flat and unimaginative in my mind. I ended up resorting to dissolve transitions between each of these steps because the continuity would have never flowed otherwise.

Inquire—What concepts/techniques do you still need to learn about to gain mastery of the material? How do you know? I need more practice in lighting a scene. I know this because only one of my scenes really "popped" as being particularly well-lit. Having said this, it seems that using a set in a facility with a lighting grid overhead would make a world of difference. I have some experience working in a television studio, but the ability to recognize when I've got it "just right" when doing my own lighting setup feels a long way off. I also need more experience in order to learn how to work with directing talent. It takes a specific subset of skills to effectively communicate my mental picture of how things should go to the participants that will have to embody that vision and realize it in front of the camera.

Suggest—What could you have done differently to improve your performance or contribution? Reflecting on the day of the shoot, I realize that I could have spent more time practicing with the available lighting resources before working with the talent. Doing this while expecting them to then give an enthusiastic performance was asking a lot. I need to compartmentalize the technical from the creative live-action aspects of the shoot. Once I have the lighting set, I need to take time to work with the talent and practice their parts, coaching them toward a series of successful takes.

Elevate—How will you approach similar situations in the future? How does this experience inform your professional objectives? Frankly, I have always anticipated a future of making screencasts in order to teach computer science, but I realize now how engaging it is to introduce a topic with an enacted story. So it was an unexpected part of my mastery journey to blend my storytelling filmmaking skills with a highly controlled instructional process in order to meet specific learning objectives. This unique intersection of professional trajectories and past experiences is very intriguing to me and using video to tell a story adds an immensely rewarding aspect to the instructional design process for me.

EME6227 Game strategy and motivation

This month of study focused on designing an interactive game experience that would motivate students and accomplish learning objectives. My process drew on my love of adventure games and years of playing Dungeons & Dragons. The concept art I produced was almost completely original and I found this particularly challenging as the volume required was quite large. Admittedly, the concept was extremely broad and not limited to a particular content base. Rather, the design reflects a gamified learning system for delivering conceptually complex topics with a large base of terminology and component parts that are all interrelated. The sample artwork used the topic of Computer Science basics with terms such as "bit" and "byte" and their relationship to each other.

Game design has sparked the most creativity and ambition in my journey through the Instructional Design master's program so far. There are more ideas where these came from and I realize that I am very interested in leveraging interactive gaming for delivering complex content. There was a great sense of reward from delving into the many decisions that went into creating the overall game concept. Each smaller piece affected the bigger picture and I found it personally engaging to juggle all these aspects at once while also considering the look and feel of the interface. The greatest challenge was the final layer of creating an audiovisual presentation to bring all the pieces together. During this process, I discovered gaps in my design that I wanted to fill and this retroactively affected some of the most fundamental assets I had produced earlier.

I am particularly intrigued with puzzle games and this is reflected in the design of the mini-games that make up the formative assessments in my interactive learning system. During this month, I discovered the game "Human Resource Machine" by Tomorrow Corporation. This game teaches computational thinking by presenting machine language programming in the context of a busy office where workers accomplish the low-level tasks assigned to a typical CPU. This was a very inspiring find because I have been thinking for a while about how to introduce this very mundane subject to my computer science students. Playing this game forces the player to think like a low-level Central Processing Unit and helps answer the mysterious question as to how computers do what they do at their most basic level. Kudos to the developers!

In summary, I believe this has been an insightful month that may lead to a career option in educational game design. Please enjoy the presentation of my design below.

EME6630 Learning Management Systems and Organization

Reflection on Developing a Course Content Map

Developing a content map has been a new experience for me and I can see that it plays a valuable role in designing a learning module. Because this module is based on an existing training document, the first step in developing the map involved studying the provided material for its inherent structure and logical progression of ideas. Having personally taken the Red Cross First Aid/CPR/AED training every other year for the past 10 years, I was aware that these three primary topics are often covered separately and that there is a logical flow within each of the three. My only enduring criticism of the training is the lack of introductory material helping a layperson to evaluate random emergency situations and deciding how to help. The training PDF includes this introduction, so I decided to devote the initial class meeting to rapidly evaluating emergency situations. By having students make their own flowchart for deciding on appropriate interventions, they will better internalize this material during the first lesson. The remaining topics divided easily into three additional lessons taken from the title: CPR, AED, and first aid training.

In deciding content types, I was highly influenced by my experience with the Red Cross online training simulations that have been the primary delivery method for the training I’ve taken for over a decade. These training modules include text, videos, and scenario-based assessments that must be successfully completed before moving on to subsequent topics. These online modules, together with in-person practice of CPR and AED administration on certified mannequin equipment, have served as a well-balanced, albeit brief, coverage of the information that is summarized in the training PDF. In creating the content map, I decided to include the interactive online material I was familiar with, along with more time for individualized inquiry in the form of WebQuests followed by in-class sharing and discussion. Searching the Internet for relevant information is a low-impact way to engage students while giving the instructor a chance to informally assess individual student comprehension of the main ideas being discussed. By sharing what they’ve found, students reveal their ability to sift through information for what is relevant, and instructors can address misinformation or common myths that might surface during an online search.

Finally, the reflection activities I chose are meant to engage the learner emotionally as this has been shown to develop intrinsic motivation toward the material. I chose to have the students watch testimonials of people involved in administering and receiving some of the life-saving interventions taught in the course. By reflecting on these outside of class, the student will connect with the material at a deeper level than hypothetical scenarios can afford. By balancing the emotional and intellectual context of the material, the learner has a better chance of establishing lasting connections to the material in their long-term memory.

Reflection on this Month's Learning Experience

Procrastination was the deadly sin of the month this time around. With school starting, I had very little creative energy to invest in these assignments. It should have triggered a warning that self-care was on the decline, as procrastination is my go-to method of escapism when responsibilities are squeezing my mental recuperation time down to the barest margins. Instead of trying to find inspiration in the waning moments before a deadline, I would better invest that time early on. I also made the mistake of seeing my schedule as a battle between work and school, rather than an integrated mix of disciplines.

This is my eleventh year as a full-time teacher and 12-month support staff at my school. Because I am responsible for ensuring a supportive and functioning technical infrastructure for our teachers, my time during the summer is spent primarily preparing for other teachers’ success. Every year, the new school year hits like a typhoon as students inundate campus as I must rebalance my responsibilities to include being an effective teacher at the same time that technical support issues escalate exponentially. I still have no idea how to improve this situation other than to find a full-time role as either an educational technologist or a full-time instructional designer.

The health complications I experienced this month and the sudden rise of Covid-19 cases in my community make it hard to feel that there is a logical adjustment that I could make to be better engaged than I was this month. It is true that I will be glad when the demands of this program finally abate but the increased stress of working as a teacher during a pandemic will continue to be an inescapable burden. I need to adjust my focus toward anticipating graduation and the career-related opportunities that go with this final stretch. That would certainly be an appropriate commitment to make at this point.

Please see my continued journey in Instructional Design at my website, https://www.davekobliska.com