This eLearning experience takes healthcare employees through a wellness planning program aimed to help learners achieve their individual wellness goals.
I created this learning experience as a part of the capstone project for my graduate degree. I chose this project for two reasons. One, helping myself and others with healthy living is one of the passions.
Two, one of my close friends was asked to leave her pharmacy residency program. Witnessing her chronic burnout and lack of support from certain superiors in the program, I was compelled to create training that addresses wellness for healthcare workers, especially hospital residents.
Heavily influenced by design thinking, I completed my project in a number of stages: understanding the learner, defining the problem, ideating, creating the solution, and implementing and testing it. The rest of the page presents the details of my process.
Research is a major step in the instructional design process that I find is sometimes under emphasized. In all the projects I have worked on, it has been crucial for me to survey available literature to gain a cursory understanding of the topic before speaking with a subject-matter expert.
For this project, after my preliminary research, I conducted informal interviews with subject-matter experts (SMEs), i.e. healthcare professionals and students, to gauge their experience with wellness in the healthcare industry. From previous experience, I find successful interviews require striking a balance between guiding the interviewee with appropriate questions while allowing space for spontaneous thoughts and ideas.
After conducting the interview, I drew a more clear picture of the needs and issues at hand, but decided to create empathy maps and learner personas before delving deeper into the instructional problem.
A great learning experience caters exactly towards the target learner. Creating empathy maps and learner personas helps instructional designers visualize the target learner more concretely. Anytime I lost direction or felt overwhelmed during my design process, the empathy map and learner personas below aided in me focusing on who I was trying to help and what they really needed.
For this stage of the project, I delve into the theoretical components of learning design to serve as a strong foundation my learning experience. I used a number of models, theories, and strategies:
Backwards design – First I defined my goal and objectives. Then I chose a summative assessment that accurately measures my goal. Finally, I designed the content and activities to serve as a bridge between the goal and assessment.
Divergent and convergent thinking – I used strategies from divergent thinking to conjure as many possible ways to present the content. I then used convergent thinking to narrow down to the best and most feasible idea.
Cognitivism and constructivism – Since my projected focused on implementation, I wanted to the learner to take a more active role in the learning experience. I included a section in which learners read through scenarios of wellness-related problems and decide what steps to take. In addition, learners were required to create their own individual wellness programs and implement them over a number of days.
Merril’s Principles of Instruction – I used parts of this framework to keep my project application-based and problem-centered.
Fink’s Significant Learning – Because my project aimed to help learners increase their own motivation, I emphasized introspection. This learning theory highlights the more “human” aspects of learning, and I used concepts to inform the reflective style of the learning experience.
Transformative Learning – The crux of my project revolves around learners being able to self-introspect honestly, create goals and a plan, and then implement the plan consistently. These skills are often much more difficult to acquire. For this reason, I reviewed the phases from the theory of transformative learning, and tried to incorporate them as much as possible.
Next, I outlined my module content and activities. I reviewed the Universal Design for Learning framework to make sure everything was following practices for accessibility. I also researched different development tools I could use that would work best for my content, budget, and target learners.
Based on the information above, I created a text-based storyboard. The learning experience includes five sections with the last section culminating in the summative assessment.
After researching and testing different tools, including LMSs and eLearning authoring tools, I chose to develop my project on isEazy. I made a simple prototype using PowerPoint to test the design and color scheme and then created part of a section on isEazy as the prototype to test design and functionality.
Introduction Slide
Content Slide
Once I was satisfied with the prototype, I developed the full project.
In design-based learning, iteration is key to creating great e-Learning. I decided to test the learning experience on a group of learners. First, I uploaded the developed project as a SCORM package onto Talent LMS, which I chose for its features and clean, accessible interface. I added an introduction, surveys, and assessment. I emailed learners from the LMS with all the information and then checked in with them periodically to ensure they had enough support.
In order to evaluate my learning experience, I conducted a qualitative study based on the pre-module and post-module survey results. I also looked at the data analytics provided in the LMS to check completion rates and time spent on the module and assessment. From the resulting data, I decided to make a number of changes, such as adding more interactivity and tweaking the design of the summative assessment. The evaluation phase proved to be extremely useful in improving the learning experience for future use.
I really enjoyed working on this project because it was the first time I got to implement design-based thinking to a complex, real-life problem. My friend, who was struggling in her residency program, also participated and stated that it was helpful in taking steps to reach her personal wellness goals.
Because the topic was so broad and focused on implementation, initially, I felt overwhelmed about which angle to approach it from and how to make the learning experience something valuable and impactful for the learners as opposed to something boring and repetitive as many of these courses tend to be. I spent a lot of time on the research and design phases to make sure my project would be cohesive and useful.
AI is advancing rapidly, so for this project, I decided to experiment with it. After playing with ChatGPT, AI-based eLearning authoring tools, and AI-image generators, I came to the conclusion that while AI is useful in some areas, the results were not satisfying enough for my projects. Besides ethical concerns regarding AI images, I preferred images by human creators to images by AI, so I did not use any AI images. For content, I only found AI helpful in creating categories for my wellness assessment, which I had to heavily edit. I realized that AI is more of an aid rather than a replacement for my work.
Overall, working on this eLearning experience was fruitful in deepening my understanding of learning technologies and educational design principles. I hope to use this experience to help learners in various fields and organizations.
