Problem

Product

People

We are professional learning designers with experience creating online courses and programs in higher education. We are also graduating masters students from the Digital Media Design for Learning program at NYU Steinhardt. Our shared passion for online learning, storytelling, and digital media inspired us to collaborate on this thesis. After 8 months of dedication, hard work, and so so much research, this is the result. Thanks for visiting!

Progress

User Research

We conducted 1o user interviews including 7 support staff members and 4 faculty across private, public, and 2-year institutions. We learned that the key barriers for both instructional support staff and faculty course developers is a lack of training in the following areas

1. The use of digital tools and media platforms

2. The practical application of learning theory

3. Concerns around student engagement and preparedness

Literature Review

We concluded from both researching users and reviewing the literature, that narrative could be a useful hub for addressing these key concerns outlined above.

1. Stories can also be told using many different mediums, giving us a useful entry-point to digital multimedia content, which can be better for learning than reading text alone (Mayer, 2005).

2. Learning theory supports the use of narrative-centered learning environments to students sustain their concentration, interest, and sense of immersion in a given learning task (Rowe et al., 2011).

3. Stories are like maps of our human nature. They connect us to each other across culture, geography, and time (Booker, 2005). They help us surface our points-of-view, which we can interrogated to arrive at the truth (Bruner, 2003).

Prototypes

Once we reached the prototyping phase, we each pursued different approaches, both using story as a key element of the design. We documented these prototypes on separate project pages linked below.

Design Rationale

Three different ways for community members to engage and contribute.

1) Blog

Blog posts are designed to provide quick, easy to read reviews of narrative learning design examples, tools, and theory. Posts have been organized into three subcategories:

• Course Library

• Storytellers' Toolkit

• Why Stories Matter

2) Discussion

All blog posts contain a discussion section to help facilitate social knowledge construction, encourage active community participation, and provide for recognition of contributions and expertise from community members.

3) Content Repository

Featured blog posts will also include links out to complete examples of narrative learning design in their native platforms so that interested community members can take a deeper dive into the various interactive digital media, complete courses, and research projects featured in each blog post.

Wenger and Trayner describe the importance of including "multiple levels of participation" in communities of practice. "Because involvement can produce learning in multiple ways and the domain has different levels of relevance to different people, the boundaries of a community of practice are more flexible than those of organizational units or teams. (2011)"

This model allows for a range from informal to robust participation. For example, a blog post about the use of plot development in a math course could provide inspiration for instructors of teaching history, while a detailed look at a specific module within the instructor's LMS will be more valuable to other math instructors or those using the same LMS.