EIP Online Tutorials
Background
Until Summer 2021, California State University, Fullerton used a highly customized version of the free and open-source learning management system (LMS) Moodle. CSUF’s customized version was called TITANium. Little documentation and training material existed for users (students) to work within LMS, and tutorials that were available were of low value as they didn’t reflect the customized UI in CSUF’s iteration of Moodle.
A student support solution was needed, and with public resources not available or appropriate for CSUF’s application, an in-house development project began.
Analysis
To begin, I identified some needs analysis questions and honed in on some key considerations:
What resources do students need, and how do we know they need them?
Which development format(s) align with the training needed?
Where would the training material be housed and accessed?
and, How do we ensure that content can be easily and rapidly updated?
First, I identified key training topics. Many were obvious through my work as an instructional designer for online programs, such as commonly used activities in the LMS such as posting to discussion forums, submitting assignments, and using Zoom. To gain additional insight however, I needed to understand the questions students were asking directly.
To accomplish this, I met with the program support team and also gained access to the primary support email account where students email with questions related to online courses. This proved to be a treasure trove of data, and I was able to quickly catalog what just-in-time tutorials were students looking for.
During this research, I discovered training gaps for a whole subset of students we weren't catering to. Due to scope creep, this was shelved but addressed in another project.
Design and Development
With this information, I began to map out the deliverables into categories:
Getting Ready for Online Learning | 1 deliverable (future project)
Getting Started with TITANium | 4 deliverables
TITANium Activites | 8 deliverables
Zoom | 3 deliverables
Contact Us
Since many of the tutorials were task-oriented and short in nature, I opted to create bite-sized videos using Camtasia. After completing all screen-capture, post-production, captioning, and publishing, I hosted and configured the videos on the university’s local server to be streamed.
Due to the sheer amount of tutorials, I opted to develop a custom webpage using Adobe Spark (now called Adobe Creative Cloud Express) accessible to the general public. This way, the webpage link can be accessed by students that are interested in taking an online course to show strong support existed, those that are preparing to begin a course, and those currently in a course. Adobe Spark is very easy and intuitive to use, making future updates incredibly simple and fast.
Evaluation
After deploying the EIP Online Tutorials page, common emails related to how to complete course activities were reduced by over 80%, allowing our student support department to focus more on potential students interested in enrolling in our programs. We continually monitored the student support email account for additional training gaps that may have been missed.