Professional Basics - A Guide for High School

Abstract

“Professional Basics: A Guide for High School” is a short lesson set designed to teach and review basic professional skills to teen students. The course mini-lessons are formatted using Articulate Rise 360 to serve as bell ringers (short, under 10 minute lessons) that can be utilized in any high school classroom at any point in the year, without disrupting the regular curriculum. The product is designed to compliment instruction and be used as needed based on instructor evaluation of needed professional skills amongst their students. All materials and planning are pre-made to ensure that the lessons can be implemented immediately with minimal prep time required from teachers.

Responsibilities: instructional design (focus groups, storyboarding, mockups, prototype, user testing, full development), visual design, eLearning development

Audience: 9-12th grade students and teachers

Learning theories: Cognitivism, constructivism, readiness to know, Bloom’s Taxonomy

Tools used: Google Docs, Rise 360, Storyline 360, Zoom

To check out the full prototype, see “Professional Basics: A Guide for High School”.

---

The Problem and Solution

Through my time as an English teacher, I worked extensively with high schoolers at every grade level. I found myself frequently frustrated by how much instructional time I had to allocate to teaching students professional skills. Students came to my classes lacking basic skills like how to write a school and business appropriate email. Despite it not being part of my set curriculum or plan, I often gave up class and planning time to set students up for success in these skills.

In this prototype eLearning course, I set out to help teachers solve this problem by designing mini-lessons to cover the basic professional skills many students need.

My Process

I chose to use a blend of Universal Backwards Design (UbD) and the ADDIE model to develop this learning experience. UbD worked well as I learned through holding a series of focus groups with subject matter experts (SMEs) prior to development the major frustrations high school teachers are facing in regards to current students’ professional skills. I learned that in many cases students come to classrooms not having basic knowledge (such as how to write an email or present in front of the class) and educators find themselves playing catch up to help students obtain those needed skills. Using the end goal: professionally literate students, I was able to work backwards to develop terminal and enabling objectives for my mini-lessons. After determining objectives I could plan the best assessments for evaluating if learners mastered the needed skills.

Along with UbD, ADDIE played a large role in my development process. During the Analysis phase, I held several focus groups with educators to evaluate and determine the problem. After listening and hearing the teacher response, I began identifying possible solutions and the medium that might best fit teacher and learner needs. Moving into the Design phase I used observations and conclusions to storyboard three mini courses for my prototype. The three courses featured are: email etiquette, MLA formatting, and basic public speaking skills. These three topics are varied but met the needs the teachers discussed in the focus groups and were a good starting point for future mini-lesson development. During this phase I also determined the best “bell ringer” assignments for each lesson’s assessment piece.

In the development stage I designed the course and mini lessons through Rise 360 incorporating interactive elements for both engagement and immediate feedback. In the email etiquette lesson I also utilized OpenAI by designing a personalized chatbot to provide the learner with immediate feedback on an email draft. This required developing the chatbot in Storyline 360 through light Javascript and prompt engineering. I then used the block from Storyline in my Rise course. After completing the prototype, I started user testing with the primary audience of high school students. Further revision followed this data collection phase. While I have not implemented this course yet, the next step will be gaining more feedback from actual users and learners and then evaluating the effectiveness for future modifications.

Focus Groups

Early in the analysis stage I conducted focus groups with my secondary audience of high school educators. I felt this was an important audience to gather data from because while I wanted to design something to teach students, I knew teachers would have input on what were the biggest problems they were facing in their classrooms. These focus groups allowed me to explore multiple avenues relating to eLearning in the 9-12 classroom and what teachers were already using and found helpful.

User Testing

After completing a working, interactive prototype, I organized a series of user-testing to allow for further feedback from both my primary (high school students) and secondary (teachers) audiences. This process provided valuable insight into potential bugs in the mini-lessons and users were able to share honest opinions and suggestions for improvement. I implemented most suggestions.

Favorite Features

• OpenAI Chatbot During the prototyping process I used Articulate 360 and javascript to code in an interactive chatbot feature so learners can get immediate feedback on an email draft. Creating a functional AI feature required prompt-engineering to ensure the feedback was relevant, concise, and usable.

• Drag and Drop In Storyline 360 I designed a simple drag and drop interaction for students to assess their knowledge of how to format a document in MLA.