This past year I was part of a project funded by the Research Universities’ Council of British Columbia (RUCBC), an entity which represents the interests of BC’s research universities (UBC, TRU, RRU, UVic, SFU and UNBC). The project involved creating education in sexual violence prevention so that the universities could address the four related topics of consent, relationships & boundaries, bystander intervention and supporting a survivor of sexual violence with their students.

I was one of a small number of people working on this project. My role was to help another consultant draft learning outcomes for the four topics above – what were the key concepts that they wanted students to learn about each? – and create ‘wraparound’ learning activities for four short videos that were being created, one for each of the topics. Our goals were to:

1. create a lesson plan for teaching the topics in person,
2. design the same activities for teaching the topics asynchronously online, and
3. create a matching e-learning module that students could participate in by themselves online if the universities chose to offer that option to students instead

The idea was that designing for each of these three modes would allow each of the six universities to offer the education in the way that worked for them and their students.

So that’s what we did! For the face-to-face lesson plans we crafted three different versions of the plan, “accordioned” in terms of content and activities if the universities had only 30 minute, 60 minute, or 90 minute time slots. The online asynchronous plan was similar. But here I’d like to show you the e-learning module that I created, because it’s a little more interesting to look at than the fully text-based plans for the other two modes.

I used Articulate Storyline 360 to create the e-learning module, starting from a template in the Articulate Content Library and customizing it for our purposes. (This allowed us to keep to project budget and timelines.) I’ll share a few of the slides from the module here.

Let’s start with the first image below, which is the title page of the module. The images for all slides were drawn from the videos that were created, featuring characters that were voiced by real people but created to look like a unique compilation of magazine cutouts – or at least that’s how I think of them!) I wasn’t involved in the creation of the videos other than to review the scripts and ensure alignment with the learning outcomes, but I really thought that the use of these characters was a brilliant inclusion with such an important – and sensitive – topic.

The next slide presents the main topics addressed in the course. Students can explore the topics in any order that they wish:

For each topic we had an introduction slide such as the one below. Here it overviews the topic and the learning outcomes we hope the student would achieve after watching the video and participating in the interactions for this section:

All topics in the course were built around the four videos; this slide presents the Active Bystander video to the student. All videos were approximately 2 minutes in length, so not onerous for the student to watch, but still very impactful. (I wish I could show them to you but they have not yet been made available to the public. If they are at some point, I’ll update this post to include them.)

Each topic includes some simple quizzing for the student to respond to, based on what they learned from watching the video. This slide readdresses concepts that were shared in the Power and Boundaries video:

This e-learning module along with the face-to-face and online lesson plans have been shared with the six universities and should be rolling out to students across BC this September and beyond. It was a pleasure to be a part of this educational project on this important topic.