Design Challenge: 30 Minutes of Learning

I have been working on a design assignment recently. Here’s the Design Brief:

• Learners would be academic department chairs, faculty and course developers and only have 30 minutes to commit to learning this module
• Topic: Competency-Based Learning in Higher Education

I had about two weeks to complete this assignment. Some of you may know that I’ve been out of the country for a while and most of my belongings are still out of the country. I operate now in a minimalist mode with only 5% of my belongings. In order to create this module, I finally had to go out and purchase a new desktop computer capable of supporting multimedia e-learning development work. Trying to create animated video clips on a laptop with a small screen real estate was impossible. So splurged I did. On hardware, on software, and more. Not affiliated with an institution means I couldn’t have discounted educational licenses and everything came out of my own pocket. A WordPress gravity form plugin costs US$39 now. Up to a point, I couldn’t pay for anymore tools or materials to create the module.

Bearing in mind time, money and other resource constraints, what follows are some screenshots of the module I came up with.

It took a few days of ongoing research to understand the subject matter and about 7 days to develop the prototype.  I’m okay with it. It could be more engaging if I had more time and resources, but I did what I could with the limitations I faced. I’ll revisit this later to share updates on the planning and thinking process.