It's "A-live!" Book

Learner Challenge Context

I teach a Communication Essentials course to first year students. My learner challenge is that my course is a heavy reading and writing course, but my students needed different avenues of accessing the content, such as more visuals, interaction with the content, and potentially less text.

To the left, the image is of my landing page within the LMS -- talk about simple. And for some students, they do not mind this, but for others, they need more engagement.

My goal was to take week 1 material (at the very least) and convert it to an H5P interactive book and look for ways to better engage the students with the content.

Process for empathizing with my learners

(Click the arrow to the right to read more!)

Empathizing with my learners was enlightening. After I reviewed an older development shell I had worked on for a course I had taught a number of years in a row, I realized how little visuals I included and few engagement pieces. I spent time reflecting on my students' perspectives and asked myself, what would I want to read, see, and experience if I was the student? I like engagement, but I also like simplicity and clarity. So I set out to research how to change my week one material into an interactive book, but it morphed into something else.

My learner challenge, the steps I took, and my implementation...

When I was researching how to create an H5P Interactive Book, I realized it may not be the simplest solution to my issue. Interactive books are great, but I still needed to incorporate my content in Blackboard in a simple form. In other words, attempting to morph my entire week into a book could work, but I was unsure whether this was the best idea -- to have an interactive book, plus my regular content, or could I scrap the regular layout and use only the interactive book?

I decided to work with H5P to change certain pieces of information. This way I did not have to convert my entire week of material and risk sacrificing clarity, but rather, I had the chance to customize some basic information into an engaging format. The images above depict the difference between my text introductions and my image hotspot introductions, created within H5P.

The steps I took to create this were simple. I thought about changing the introduction to my week one material, because frankly, introductions may be paid the least amount of attention. So why not create an alluring image that depicts a journey (hence the path through the mountains) and add my points through videos, images, and text to make up four hotspots that students could scan over and read/watch.

Implementation is manageable. Create the material you want/need for your hotspots, insert it into the H5P object, and then embed the hotspot introductions into Blackboard (LMS). When I think about the bigger picture, I started to realize that creating a simple engagement piece at the beginning of every week might help students feel like they have something to look forward to and possibly meet the needs of learners who prefer visual cues.

When I get back to teaching a live course, I will look forward to integrating more visuals... which, clearly I am still working on based on how much I just wrote, but I thought I would test out one of my other ideas in this process to make content more engaging: yeah Google Sites!

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