One of the projects I worked on this year through my work at Royal Roads University in faculty development was creating an online interactive resource in Articulate Storyline. It’s a simple tool that is intended to help faculty members choose between RRU faculty development workshops so that they can enhance their teaching and/or technology skills. We’re calling the resource a “workshop selector”.

When faculty members first enter the selector there’s an introduction page:

Once the faculty member clicks on ‘Let’s Get Started!’ they are asked, on the next page, to choose one of four presented profiles of “typical” RRU faculty that they feel is most like them. All the profiles have varying levels of expertise in terms of online and face-to-face teaching, as well as familiarity with Royal Roads. In this screenshot I’ve clicked on Belinda. We can see she is new to RRU, new to teaching and will be teaching face-to-face at RRU:

If the faculty member chooses Belinda then another page will come up with workshop recommendations for them. In this example we can see that RRU is recommending four faculty development offerings:

1. Moodle: Getting Around (the introductory course to learn the Moodle learning management system)
2. The faculty orientation resource called Teaching and Course Design at RRU
3. The Instructional Skills Workshop, and
4. A more advanced Moodle course entitled Editing & Enhancing (which teaches faculty how to build a course using Moodle)

Clicking through each of the four blue rectangles on the left shows more detail at right. There is a button underneath each description to either help the faculty “find next offering” or locate the item on a self-study website or otherwise:

To create this resource I first uploaded the RRU branded PowerPoint template (which unfortunately changed just after I created this – looks like I’ll be updating this in 2018!) into Storyline. Then I built the interactions from scratch, honing the workshop descriptions so that they were as clear and concise as I could get them.

For years we’ve wrestled at RRU with how to clearly describe the workshops that we offer to faculty and help them choose the workshops that are most useful to them in the order that it makes sense to take them. I hope this resource is a fun and interesting way for them to learn a little bit more about the (free!) workshops available to enhance their teaching practice and their technological skills.

If you’d like to visit the RRU workshop selector for yourself, you’ll find it here: https://media.royalroads.ca/owl/media/ctet/facultyselector/story_flash.html. Enjoy!