Designed and written by ASC Office of Distance Education Instructional Designer, Sarah Dove.
The Career Coaching Staff in the College of Arts and Sciences’ Center for Career and Professional Success (Career Success) approached the Office of Distance Education (ODE) to brainstorm potential alternatives for their regularly delivered presentations to first-year or early-career-transfer student survey classrooms regarding resources and opportunities that are available to students enrolled in degree programs within the College of Arts and Sciences (ASC). Over the course of the semester, these one-credit survey courses, led by Academic Advisors, are meant to acclimate students to university life by providing information about university resources, exploring student-life productivity and efficiency strategies, and offering guidance on how to meet academic benchmarks toward degree completion. Because these courses cover a broad range of topics and draw on the expertise of multiple individuals and diverse groups of professionals, Coaches in Career Success have a limited amount of time to share their vast repository of career and professional resources with survey students.
The process that Career Coaches were used to following involved visiting a survey classroom, delivering a presentation, fielding a brief question-and-answer session, providing a list of resources (primarily links to their web resources for further information), and designing a few low-stakes knowledge check activities from which lead instructors would choose. Increasingly, Career Coaches expressed frustration at their lack of ability to go deeper than a surface-level tour through some of their key resources. Major pain points for Career Coaches included feeling restrained by having to deliver lengthy presentations and not being able to spend as much time interacting with student questions and concerns. Further, Coaches desired a more meaningful and lasting resource that could be delivered to students as a reference, as their needs dictated. Thus, initial goals for this collaboration between Career Success and ODE included:
- reducing time spent in lecture-style delivery, and increasing time given to answering specific questions and sharing information about specific events hosted by Career Success,
- including an introduction to the full Career Coaching Staff to help increase student familiarity and reduce anxiety in advance of one-on-one meetings, and
- ensuring that students retained access to crucial Career Success information long after its initial presentation.
Finally, as this would become a resource that would be delivered to more than forty survey instructors, the solution would need to be easy to access and include within a course and require little to no maintenance or troubleshooting.
Since ASC advisors serving as course instructors were ultimately responsible for the design and maintenance of their survey courses in CarmenCanvas (Carmen), our plans needed to account for creating learning assets that could easily be imported without the risk of over-cluttering or interruption. Given these factors, along with the amount of information that needed to be shared, I began development of a Carmen Module titled “Getting Started with Career Success” that could be shared via Canvas Commons for easy import into Carmen courses by survey instructors.
At the outset of development, Career Success shared their presentation slide deck and outline with me and highlighted the most important top-level items that would need to guide the development: Career Coaching, Readiness Competencies, and Handshake. Based on these materials and the goals of this collaboration, I employed UXDL principles in conjunction with a flipped-classroom model to approach development, foregrounding:
- Segmenting to break content into shorter, learner-controlled chunks of information,
- “Visceral” and “human” design elements to increase the impact of the resources being shared, and
- Flexibility in accessing and processing information through engaging, low-stakes activity and assessment integration.
Highlighting learner control through a “Flipped Classroom”
“Flipped classroom” is an active learning strategy that seeks to utilize class time for more engaged interactions and activities and arranges for primary learning that would ordinarily have been delivered via lectures to be accessed by students in advance of class time (“Flipped Classroom,” Harvard University). This allows students to process learning material at their own pace and in a manner that maximizes their understanding and allows instructors to more easily identify common pain-points and topics that need further clarity.
Translating presentation material to maximize impact and clarity means engaging in careful content reorganization. It is important to adopt a translational process, since material delivered during an in-person presentation often comes across very differently than it does in a text only format. Direct transposition can result in confusion and overwhelm. Thus, figuring out how to add interactions and curate the text being delivered is key. Since Career Coaches are the Subject Matter Experts (SMEs), when they give presentations, they have the benefit of being on-hand to answer any questions that should arise with ease. The translation process involved doing a lot of extra research and combing through Career Success web resources and messaging to ensure that the information that students encountered in the Module was ultimately consistent, accurate, and engaging. Using the image gallery below, you can see the translational process at work.
Figure Captions
Fig. 1: Career Success Slide Deck 1
Fig. 2: Career Success Slide Deck 2
Fig. 3: Career Success Slide Deck 3
Fig. 4: Career Success Presentation Outline 1 (Short Version)
Fig. 5: Career Success Presentation Outline 2 (Short Version)
Fig. 6: Career Success Presentation Outline 3 (Long Version)
Fig. 7: Career Success Presentation Outline 4 (Long Version)
Fig. 8: Career Success Module Translation 1
Fig. 9: Career Success Module Translation 2
Fig. 10: Career Success Module Translation 3
Fig. 11: Career Success Module Translation 4
Fig. 12: Career Success Module Translation 5
Fig. 13: Career Success Module Translation 6
These examples highlight design elements that help to focus learner attention, such as the careful use of bold text and unorganized lists, and the inclusion of the “Readiness Competencies” survey activity allows for learners to digest the content that they are being given from the seat of their personal experience allowing for the material to become more personal.
Building community and demonstrating impact
An in-person experience might include similar moments of reflection to the one demonstrated in the example gallery above. For an online learning context, using available tech tools (in this example a combination of ThingLink and Microsoft Forms — OSU login required to access this link) unlocks similar potential, with the added benefit of Career Coaches having different response data to reflect on as they consider the impact of their services. Throughout the “Getting Started with Career Success” Module, there were many opportunities for students to interact and engage with their learning. In addition to the “Readiness Competencies” survey that displayed real time response data, there was one other interactive opportunity where students had the ability to immediately see their responses in relation to the responses of their peers.
Fig. 1: Career Success Slide Deck, Audience Participation
Fig. 2: ThingLink Poll 1
Fig. 3: ThingLink Poll 2
The snapshot that this simple interaction provides allows both students and Career Success staff to see how many others have also participated in the activity, how their responses fit within the scope of total responses, as well as the pervasive feeling that the community of learners is experiencing.
Increasing flexibility and motivation
There were also a number of other interactions built into the primary content that contained vital Career Success information and resources, and that offered the opportunity for students to experience and digest at their own pace. Each page in Carmen contained the most important information in text while the interactive resource that appeared alongside it provided a reiteration of key information and an alternative means through which to experience it. For example, Career Coaches had the ability to share the location of the ASC Career Success offices as a part of their presentation, but the translation of this material presented the opportunity to build a virtual tour in ThingLink that gave students a glimpse of the physical location in advance, as well as an introduction to the Career Coaching staff answering frequently asked questions in short videos that were embedded throughout the tour where their offices were located.
Fig. 1: Career Success Slide Deck, Office Location
Fig. 2: Career Success Virtual Tour 1
Fig. 3: Career Success Virtual Tour 2
Having this resource at their fingertips allows students to gain confidence in advance of scheduling Career Coaching appointments or seeking out help with their resumés. Further, this is a resource that they can consult again and again as the need arises.
Preliminary Feedback and Results
The “Getting Started with Career Success” Module was initially made available for Autumn semester 2023 and was downloaded by instructors a total of 43 times. For the interactions that were built specifically for this Module, and across all courses where the Module was included, we recorded the following:
- 325 responses to the “How Do You Feel” ThingLink poll.
- 298 responses to the short “Readiness Competencies” survey.
- 152 attempts to complete the “Using Handshake” scenario that was embedded within the Module content.
- 230 unique viewer interactions for the “Explore Career Success” guided tour and a 74% completion rate from that group of viewers.
Utilizing learning tools in this way allows the Career Success team to evaluate the perceived impact of these interactions in conjunction with the number of coaching appointments scheduled, total event attendees, the increase in Handshake profile creation, and much more across the course of a semester. They would then have the ability to compare these findings with similar metrics from semesters before this content was created to investigate how projects like this one can increase the overall reach and impact of Career Success, broadly speaking.
For the sake of transparency, it is important to note that the integration of learning technology has the potential to introduce unforeseen bottlenecks and a few of these did arise for one of the low-stakes assessments that was incorporated into the Module. The most popular option was the “Getting Started with Handshake” scenario activity, and this is where some troubleshooting was required. Even though students had already been presented with an opportunity to interact with a similar scenario within the Module itself, we discovered that the instructions for how to correctly interact with the scenario and what to expect when the scenario was completed lacked the clarity required for students to feel fully equipped to complete the assignment correctly the first time. The primary issue that surfaced involved students not reaching the end screen of the scenario which ordinarily displays a “Congratulations!” message. Instead, students were exiting the scenario when they believed that they had completed all necessary steps, and thus would navigate away from it and find that their grades had not been recorded, prompting them to alert their instructors. Before Autumn semester 2024, planned improvements will be applied to ensure smoother usage for instructors and increase clarity for students, including a walk-through video with clear directions, as well as a reconfiguration of the step-by-step instructions.
Fig. 1: Carmen Assessment, Scenario Description
Fig. 2: Carmen Assessment, Scenario End Screen
Despite these few roadblocks, overall feedback from the Career Success team and many of the instructors who imported and utilized this Module was positive. Instructors especially appreciated the auto-grading feature and the general notion that all they should need to do is “spot-check” when students encountered issues. Hopefully, the planned improvements will lessen this necessity for instructor intervention and troubleshooting going forward and achieve the goal of seamlessly integrated Module content for all survey courses where this content will appear.
Resources
- “Flipped Classrooms,” The Derek Bok Center for Teaching and Learning, Harvard University. https://bokcenter.harvard.edu/flipped-classrooms.