Storytelling Fellows Teaching Team

Timeline: 1 year (June 2023 - June 2024)

Collaborators: Librarians, instructional designers, and student workers across two UW Libraries units (LibID, Open Scholarship Commons).

Audience: University of Washington students.

Responsibilities: 

• Teaching & Curriculum Development

• Web Design

• Instructional Media Production

• Graphic Design & Marketing

Tools & Methods: 

• Technologies Used: WordPress (UW Sites), HTML, CSS, Adobe Creative Suite, Google Drive, Microsoft Office, Zoom.

• Technologies Taught: Audacity, WordPress, HTML, CSS, iMovie, Clipchamp.

• Educational/Design Theories: ADDIE, Multimedia Principles, Universal Design for Learning.

Storytelling Fellows was developed by the University of Washington Libraries Instructional Design (LibID) team in the 2017-18 academic year, after their research found that students were interested in a low-stakes, accessible environment to learn media production in. 

Podcasting and video production were the main areas of interest for students, and web design was added in the 2023-24 academic year, when I joined the team as a part of my graduate assistantship. They cover the full media creation process, from pre-production, editing/reviewing, and post-production.

The main learning objectives for Storytelling Fellows are:

• Create a media artifact following a full production progress, pitching, recording, editing, reviewing, transcribing, and reflecting.

• Identify a number of tools, platforms, and strategies for developing and hosting media.

• Learn about the importance of accessibility, preservation, open access, and digital safety.

You can see some of my contributions below:

This workshop was a new offering in Winter quarter 2024, teaching students how to create websites - broadening what constitutes a "digital story" - using WordPress, as well as basic HTML and CSS. The goal was to teach web design in an accessible way, a digital literacy skill that many other libraries have been teaching about.

LibID Instructional Designer Perry Yee and I proposed the workshop after several students requested it the year before. We decided to teach it in a one-shot format over Zoom, to ensure as many students as possible could sign up.

We defined our scope and learning objectives with the rest of the teaching team, and developed a full lesson script and walkthroughs of several WordPress features. Digital accessibility was central to our teaching, as was using the Zoom chat to share relevant resources and check for understanding. 

Since this was a fairly new workshop, we also developed a self-evaluation rubric for students to fill out after completing the workshop, rather than evaluating everything ourselves like we did the podcasts and videos. We left a space for feedback on future offerings, which we hoped would inform the next version of this workshop as I passed it on. 

You can view both below:

This workshop was developed in collaboration with UW's Open Scholarship Commons (OSC), teaching the free game design software Twine.

I worked on a cross-functional team with one librarian and one graduate assistant, using the backwards design methodology to develop the learning objectives and build the lesson and activities from there. Universal Design for Learning (UDL) also came up, because this was taught in-person and therefore required students' hands-on interactions with Twine as well as visual walkthroughs in our presentation.

You can view our lesson plan and presentation below:

Since I love graphic design and enjoyed doing it for another LibID project, I also spent time creating advertisements that were put up around campus in flyer form and posted on the website and social media. If you follow the UW Libraries on Instagram and Facebook, you may have actually seen them online!

(See the Fun Stuff page for more graphic design examples, somehow even less serious than these!)