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Project for Internship with MIT Open Learning & Design Studio 3 (May 2020- July 2020)
The Project
The Project
Summary
From May 2020 through July 2020, I was an instructional design intern with MIT Open Learning, focusing on their Residential Digital Innovations work. Over the course of my 12-week design project for this internship, I designed and built an online course on the MITx platform to train MIT faculty on Lightboard technology, with an emphasis on evidence-based instructional approaches and best practices.
Overview of the Technology Involved
The Lightboard is a large panel of glass with LED lights around the edge. An instructor writes on the pane with fluorescent markers, which results in vivid writing "floating" in front of the instructor while they face toward the viewers. Lectures behind the Lightboard are recorded as videos, and the whole process takes place in a dedicated Lightboard studio, which MIT currently has on campus. A small pool of MIT faculty has been using Lightboard since 2016.
The Lighboard, featuring an MIT faculty member writing on the glass pane during a lecture.
A snapshot of MITx Studio, the side of the platform where I built the course. This is different from the LMS (Learning Management System) side, which is what the learners see and interact with.
I built the training course on MITx, which is a massive open online course (MOOC) platform at MIT. It's the constituent program of MIT's Office of Digital Learning, so courses built on the platform are geared toward MIT departments and faculty; it is essentially the residential version of the broader edX platform (which was popularized through MOOCs offered by MIT and Harvard).
Goals
Introduce Lightboard technology to MIT faculty interested in using it as a teaching tool
Explain how to use Lightboard in tandem with recommended instructional practices that will allow faculty to create videos that are effective for their students' learning
Highlight a variety of examples of existing Lightboard videos that the learners' fellow faculty members have created
Prepare faculty to step into MIT's Lightboard studio on campus and start making videos for their course(s)
Context & Learners
Learners - The target learner population consists of MIT faculty and instructors who are interested in using Lightboard technology as a way to teach some content for their courses. The majority of faculty learners will be from STEM disciplines (physics, earth sciences, engineering, etc.) but we have designed the course to account for as much variation among faculty as possible, with a focus on making the training inclusive of any faculty from any department who may want to use the Lightboard.
Relevant considerations - While there was a natural interest in Lightboard among faculty before the COVID-19 pandemic, interest that has sprung up since then has undoubtedly been spurred on by this new and evolving context of moving learning to online formats. However, the training will need to exist beyond the current emergency situation. And while we want to keep the training content broadly applicable and amendable to future use beyond the next few months or years, pandemic-related interest in Lightboard has also brought on a "culture change" around Lightboard use at MIT, where we want to promote moving away from making perfectly polished lecture videos to making more authentic ones that will likely end up replacing valuable in-person class time.
The Research
The Research
A visual summarizing and synthesizing how my research informed the goals of the Lightboard training.
Literature related to Lightboard pedagogy - My project team - consisting of a Senior Learning Scientist and Senior Educational Technology Consultant - had previously conducted some research on Lightboard pedagogy to present at an AERA conference. The research focused on codifying the actions and behaviors of MIT instructors in Lightboard videos to see how faculty develop the capacity to use video capture technology and how that is reflected in their on-camera performance. This research, as well as the small amount of other existing research on Ligthboard pedagogy, is supported by the theoretical frameworks of Cognitive Load Theory, Cognitive Theory of Multimedia Learning (Richard Mayer) and Social Learning Theory. I examined each of these theoretical lenses to better understand the impacts of Lightboard videos on learning, in order to convey that to faculty learners taking the training. I also brushed up on the tenets of Malcolm Knowles' adult learning theory (adragogy) to guide how I design for my professional adult learners.
User experience interview - I interviewed a Digital Learning Scientist and Lecturer in Physics at MIT who frequently helps Physics department faculty create Lightboard videos. Because she often works closely with a Senior Lecturer in Physics who has been using Lightboard since 2016 and is considered to be a "power user," her insights about the "do's" and "don'ts" of creating Lightboard videos, how to use the studio equipment, and MIT faculty culture were very valuable in shaping the language of the training content.
Technical knowledge transfer - Since I completed this design project remotely due to the pandemic, I was not able to go to MIT's campus to see and use the Lightboard studio. However, I was able to conduct a few quick knowledge transfer sessions with the Senior Educational Technology Consultant on my project team. We discussed all the technical aspects of the Lightboard and the studio equipment. Once I became familiar with the technical information, I was able to adapt it into more approachable "layman's" language to include in the training course.
The Product
The Product
Overview
The Lightboard training course consists of 4 main sections:
Introduction
How to Use Lightboard
Instructional Examples
Additional Resources
The course content is organized in a sequential order, building on previous content and referencing past concepts and ideas frequently, which is beneficial for learner recall.
The course was tested and reviewed by my two immediate team members, as well as other staff in MIT Open Learning: a Senior Educational Technologist, an Educational Technology Manager for Learning Environments, and a Learning Engineer. Since the majority of their feedback consisted of suggestions for future iterations of the course, I created a Plan for Improvements document with these and other design recommendations to hand over to the team at the conclusion of my internship.
The course outline page, from the learner's perspective in MITx.
Features & Critique
Introduction Section: Offering Invitations to Engage
The training is on a somewhat new, helpful technology that is relatively easy to pick up and use (the Lightboard). By promoting this in the content, the training fosters feelings of competence and autonomy (pulling from Self-Determination Theory). The Lightboard technology is also readily available at MIT so faculty will be able to apply what they learn right away, which is especially important for adult learners (a core tenet of andragogy).
Shortfalls - When crafting the language in the course content, it can be difficult to effectively strike a balance between saying Lightboard is so easy to use (so that faculty actually end up using it) but also not misleading them too much. Not all faculty will automatically think it is easy or welcoming to use.
A unit within the Introduction section highlighting the instructor's perspective on using Lightboard. It features a video of one of the Lightboard "power users" describing why he uses Lightboard and the benefits of it for his students.
How to Use Lightboard Section: Support for Mental Model Building and Sustained Engagement
The frequent use of short/"biteable" video examples of Lightboard instruction in the training constitute a multimedia experience that strengthens how the learners encode and retrieve important information and things they have to remember. This follows Mayer's Cognitive Theory of Multimedia Learning, which is what makes Lightboard videos effective for the students for whom faculty create the videos. Additionally, faculty learners "see themselves" using the Lightboard through these video examples that feature other faculty. They are more likely to trust and listen to their peers, whereas they may disengage if the example videos featured non-faculty (again, relates to both Self-Determination Theory and andragogy).
This is from a unit on instructional best practices related to the instructor's physical movements and behaviors while giving a Lightboard lecture. The video clip used here, to exemplify staying on mark and framing, features one of MIT's Lightboard "power user" faculty members. It is short, at only 1 minute long, and is introduced with priming text ("Notice in the video clip..."). This signals to the learner what they should be paying attention to when watching the video, which prepares them to actively engage with the content.
Shortfalls - While videos are the primary way to convey content about instructional best practices, the content about the technical features and workflows of the Lightboard studio are primarily presented as text, with only a few visuals (such as the Lightboard studio schematic featured in the screenshot, on the left, in one of the units). The course presents lots of technical terms at once, but perhaps with not enough visuals of these technical pieces to support learners in building a mental model of the Lightboard studio and processes before they see it in person. The idea is that we will be able to include more photos - or perhaps even a Google Tour of the studio - in a future iteration of the course.
Instructional Examples Section: Addressing Variation Among Learners
The goal of the Instructional Examples section is to highlight use cases of Lightboard for teaching, again through videos of MIT faculty who have used the technology already. To account for variation among new faculty users, the video examples show more than just physics content, though that is the majority of existing videos we had to work with.
On right - this Instructional Examples unit shows variation and representation among disciplines and faculty (a male physics instructor and a female Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary sciences instructor).
There are also engagement questions throughout the course that prompt the faculty learners to reflect on what they have been learning about Lightboard in relation to their own potential uses for Lightboard. One such question appears at the end of the Instructional Examples section; the idea is that after having viewed several video examples highlighting different uses, faculty will be able to think more deeply about how they plan to use Lightboard themselves. This is important preparation for them to do as they begin planning their time in the studio. This approach to course questions is also appropriate for this learning audience: we are not trying to quiz or trick them on the content.
Shortfalls - Although there is some variety among video examples, they are still overwhelmingly from STEM disciplines. This makes sense because it is MIT after all; but my team is hoping that in the future there will be more widespread use of Lightboard and we will start seeing examples from the School of Architecture and Planning or the School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences, for example.
Design Process Highlights & Key Takeaways
Design Process Highlights & Key Takeaways
Creatively figuring out how to get the tech to do what I want it to do - I ran into several technical constraints and limitations brought on by MITx as the online course platform I used to build the training. Rather than abandoning my design ideas after realizing they may not be feasible to build out in MITx, I instead pushed the boundaries of the platform where I could and worked with the limits to create an effective learning experience for faculty. For example:
I channeled my efforts to be deliberate about which video clips to include as content, by watching and re-watching a large collection of videos in order to edit them down to the most valuable, powerful parts.
I focused on how to organize the videos and complementing text within a unit to logically bind them together (keeping cognitive load in mind).
I took the MITx standard assessment question options, meant for assessing procedural knowledge (like for STEM disciplines), and repurposed them it into more engagement or survey-style reflection questions.
I became proficient in MITx Studio, a platform I had never used before, and worked hard to teach myself how to make things "the way I want." I improved my HTML skills, leveraged my video editing skills from when I was a technical trainer, and figured out the tips and tricks of using MITx with the help of an educational technologist.
Learning through teamwork and leadership - My project team members helped me make design decisions, using their expertise in the learning sciences and educational technology, but always gave me opportunities to bring in my own knowledge and insights. My team would always ask me questions to get me to think deeply about my design decisions and recommendations, which to me, is a model of good team leadership. In many ways, I was also able to influence my team on ideas that they had not considered before, including:
Pushing for faculty-created videos (especially featuring Lightboard "power users") in favor of re-created ones, citing engagement and motivational principles of learning.
Designing the course to also serve as a resource and not just a training course, by incorporating outline pages and jump links within the course so a learner can navigate directly to specific content. As an additional just-in-time resource, I created a Quick Start Guide, which was an original idea I had at the beginning of the project, and that we revisited again after a tester recommended adding it.
An example of a section overview page that includes links to specific units within the section, for easy navigability and a "just-in-time" option for faculty learners.
The one-page Quick Start Guide, an additional resource I led the creation of.
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