Student Orientation Course Redevelopments
Role: Project Manager, Designer, Developer
Tools: Canvas, Articulate Rise, Adobe Illustrator, Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Premiere
Process: Our school had a basic student orientation process to get students ready for online classes. My team was tasked with redeveloping the orientation course to ensure it truly prepared students for the first day of class, create a more welcoming orientation process, and make sure new students felt at ease with our school’s courses.
The project was given to us with only two months’ time before it had to be released; not enough time to make meaningful changes. Therefore, we proposed updating the course in two phases. Phase one would be a set of targeted updates to the training course for the current year. Phase two would be a complete overhaul in preparation for the next school year.
Phase one was fairly simple. We updated graphics and branding, removed unnecessary information, and added information regarding important school policies like plagiarism, attendance, and contact information. We also split the course into two versions, one for kindergarten through sixth grade and one for grades seven through twelve. The courses weren’t perfect, but they were improved, streamlined, and looked better.
For phase two, we completed a comprehensive review of the materials and determined the best course of action was to create five separate courses: Elementary, Middle, and High school, and then separate orientation courses for parents and partner schools. We also suggested creating the courses to be public Canvas courses, allowing prospective families to see the orientation courses before enrolling, acting as content marketing to help school recruitment. This also allowed students who had not completed financial check-in to prep for their school year.
Our first step was to differentiate the content for each of the five courses. The major concern with previous orientation courses was that students felt overwhelmed on the first day. Therefore, we ruthlessly cut out any information that was not vital for the first week of class. The new courses were condensed to about forty percent of the previous content. The parent and administrator courses were given all information available with the content adjusted to fit their specific concerns, questions, and daily needs.
After the content was completed, we worked with our graphic design team to perfect the course branding, images, and style. We developed videos and GIFs to help explain difficult concepts and used interactive Rise features like timelines, hotspots, and accordion content to make the course more fun and engaging.