Hello and welcome to my portfolio! My portfolio is a representation of my accomplishments as a Learning Designer. Hopefully this gives you a feel for my style and experience. Please note, the content within images is intentionally illegible for privacy reasons.
LEARNING DESIGN
MOODLE, H5P & INDESIGN
For the last three years I have specialised in the design and development of postgraduate course and short courses (micro-credentials) on CQUniversity's flexible online Be Different platform. The key feature of this platform is the courses are not term bound and have no assessment deadlines.
Please see examples below of the work I have recently completed on this platform using the native Moodle tools, HTML, CSS & H5P.
BRANCHING SCENARIOS
We use a combination of Adobe Indesign and H5P’s branching activity to creating interactive scenarios that challenge a learner to make decisions that they may need to make in the real world. In this example, I was developing an introductory graphic design micro-credential. This activity is at the end of a module on contrast. The learner needs to make decisions to improve a design, such as changing a typeface, adjusting the size of the text, and increasing contrast through altering colours. This has several benefits for adult learners:
- Increased engagement by promoting active learning, rather than passive.
- Enables learners to experiment in a safe environment.
- Teaches decision-making skills and provides real time feedback based on their decision.
CONTENT CHUNKING
Content chunking is the process of breaking down long blocks of content into bite-sized pieces, that are easy to comprehend, and commit to memory. Almost 100% of the time, when I receive content from subject matter experts it is pages and pages of text. This requires analysis and often research to enable me to identify themes and breakdown the content into ‘chunks’. I used several techniques to do this:
- Creating ordered or unordered lists
- Developing infographics with hot spots to contain the information
- Identifying themes and adding content to accordions
- Creating short animatics to summarise information (I script and storyboard – then pass onto our animators to produce).
MICRO-STORIES
Humans have been learning through stories for years, particularly our First Nations People. As Lukin (2019) explains:
“Through personal connections to the narrative details, anecdotes facilitate the incorporation of content into pre-existing knowledge and neural networks that enhances retention.”
While it may be challenging to create a course which is entirely story-based, micro-narratives are simple and easy to build into courses. I find the most efficient way to do this is using a slider, text and characters to add context. You can see I have done this for a domestic violence scenario. The SME for this course wanted the paragraph of text, typically I create a conversational piece between characters. This activity has received excellent student feedback, so I would like to do some research into the most effective way to present stories.
ARTICULATE RISE & STORYLINE 360
ARTICULATE RISE
Articulate Rise has formed part of my work for several projects over the last 4 years.
In 2021 I completed a project on behalf of CQUniversity’s Office of Social Innovation and their partner Impact Boom. This involved converting face-to-face program to a blended online offering. My colleague and I developed 12 Modules in RISE which were offered as self-paced and self-marking short courses. We went through three feedback rounds using Articulate Review, before publishing the package as a SCORM and embedding this in the LMS (Moodle).
This course has been highly successful and continues to run multiple times per year as a blended offering for organisations across Australia.
STORYLINE 360
In March 2020 I co-developed The Whanu Binal Indigenous Entrepreneur Program. This is a collaborative initiative between CQUniversity and Arrow Energy. The Program is an online learning experience that has been specifically designed to support Indigenous business owners in the field of business and entrepreneurship. The Program is presented through a series of online modules and aims to provide participants with knowledge and tools to help further grow their business and develop economic opportunities for their communities.
We worked remotely to develop this course over a 6-month period. It was a challenging project, which required significant research and collaboration with our First Nations stakeholders to ensure the content was fit for purpose and culturally appropriate. This course has been very well received by over 60 First Nations participants who have completed this course in the last two years.
This program won the Best Company Indigenous Procurement Initiative Award at the 2020 Queensland Resources Council Indigenous Awards.
DIGITAL BADGES AT CQUNIVERSITY (CREDLY)
In 2019 CQUniversity decided to introduce Digital Badges for Micro-credentials (short courses), Staff Awards and Student Awards.
I have been heavily involved in the design and development of the Digital Badging strategy since the this commenced. I have configured all Moodle sites to automatically issue Digital Badges on course completion through the use of activity completion settings.
There are now over 600 badges on the CQUniversity Credly page. For the badges which are not yet automated (staff & student awards), I work with several teams across the university to ensure they are updated and issued when required.
FUTURE LEARN (CANVAS)
In addition to my work in Moodle, I have also completed several project for Future Learn, which uses the LMS Canvas.
In March 2020 I was fortunate to manage the learning design of four Educational Neuroscience courses that consistently performed in the top 5% of Future Learn courses for 12 months. This suite of courses received 94% positive feedback from over 47,000 learners during the trial period. The suite has now been running as an paid 'expert track' for 2 years and has 4.8/5 star rating from 749 reviews.
I hope this snapshot of my work has provided some more context about my knowledge, experience and style! If you have any questions please don't hesitate to contact me at sam.coombe96@gmail.com or on 0488543041.