XplanaZine

Updated by Catherine Kerley on July 13, 2006

Do you develop online courses? Yes. I develop undergraduate and graduate level courses for the College of Liberal Studies at the University of Oklahoma. We offer 100% Online programs for both undergraduate and graduate students.

What subject matter do you prefer to work with? I like to work with a variety of subjects, but courses based in the Humanities and Cultural Studies are my favorites. The best part of the College of Liberal Studies is that our framework of instruction is interdisciplinary. So even if I’m working on a course is Natural Sciences, the Social Sciences and Humanities still come along for the ride.

Who are the intended learners? What level are they? For the most part, our intended learners are adults who are returning to school. Most of our students are undergraduates, but some are graduate students. Some students come to us as freshmen, while other undergraduates come in with over 100 credit hours. A sizable portion of our students are in the military, so we work with a wide range of students who are at varying levels in their academic journey.

How do you use graphics when you design a course? I see each course as a story of sorts and I use graphics that help tell that story. Some courses only get one graphic – those with a straight forward Ernest Hemingway approach. Other courses are more driven by the graphics – courses that focus on advertising for example.

What learning objectives do your graphics serve in an online course? Each course is a learning journey for the students, and I use graphics that not only help illustrate the topic and meaning involved with the course, but also that help guide the students through their journey.

What kind of graphical content do you use? Banners? Color-coding? Specific images? Special arrangement that displays information in a certain way on the screen? I use all of these types of graphic content in the courses I design. Each course has its own personality and I let that dictate what types of graphics are used. But we do have Web standards that all of our course must follow. This doesn’t hinder the creative process at all, but instead help push it to new levels we couldn’t achieve before. Each course must have a graphical non-printing header and footer. Background images and color are also part of our Web standards and add to the creative possibilities for each course.

Please describe your philosophy of using graphics in online courses. What I want for each course is for it to work as a part of a narrative - a narrative that hopefully takes the student on a powerful journey filled with learning – a journey through a place where each student is simply trying to step into his or her own authority of being and knowing. The graphics are set up to establish the mood and help guide the student on this journey. That seems to be the graphics’ most remarkable ability – to work as a guide. Whatever the subject and medium – from the mythical adventures of the Ancient Greeks in Humanities of the Ancient World, to the wide variety of plant and animal life in The Great American Prairie, to utopias gone bad in Culture and Science in the Modern World, to the life and death of a star in Stellar Evolution – the graphics lead the student through the intricate detail of each topic and experience and show the students the humanity behind it all.

Can a good graphic go bad? Why, when, and how might that happen? Sure it can. If it is too large for some processors to load, or if it becomes a distraction rather than a guide, the graphic no longer fulfills its purpose and instead becomes a part of a weird wasteland. Another problem is graphical overload. Sometimes courses seem to want every accessory available to them. While moving some of the courses into the new CSS W3C compliant template, some of the courses demanded everything like a spoiled child. The Great American Prairie was one of those demanding children. It wanted it all – background images unique to each page; headers and footers will prairie wild flowers, grasses, or animals on each page; Flash headers on some pages, images with QuickTime movies or sound files linked to them. Then the course wanted more Flash – Flash navigation actually. When I caved and plugged in this final demand it was disaster! The course had become Mimi on The Drew Carey Show! I had to sit down with this girl and say, “Sweetie, you’ve gone too far. Please just go wash your face, and you’ll look a lot better.”

How do graphics “mediate” the e-learning space? In this case, “mediate,” describes the way that graphics influence and even alter the way that learning takes place – between learners, instructors, and the content itself. The graphics mediate the e-learning space in different ways – there are things each student has to start working on – that he or she has to schedule his or her learning around, but the student doesn’t necessarily know exactly what he or she is going to be doing from unit to unit or from course to course. So the graphics have a powerful role in this mediation. They lead the student and help eliminate fear while at the same time they spark something – that sense of adventure that makes the student want to continue on the adventure or to embark on a new one.

Do you believe that the graphics that are used somehow influence how individual learners perceive the instructor? Do they attribute attributes of the graphics to you, your personality, your values? The graphics I use are chosen for their relationship to the subject matter. Some times, instructors want to approve the graphics for a particular course, so in those cases, the graphics might influence how the students perceive the instructor. Instructors – Subject Matter Experts – and I don’t always agree on what graphics are appropriate for a course. We have different interpretations of the subject matter. In those cases, the Subject Matter Expert always wins. I find a way to see the course through his or her lens and find the graphics that work for this vision. I don’t know if the students make a connection between the Web Designer and the graphics or not, but because I developed the course, the graphics will reflect something of me – that really can’t be avoided.

How does the interface (the Web site, course management software, e-mail, the computer screen presentation) affect how you present yourself? What are the elements in the interface that you have to compensate for? How do you compensate for them? Please describe one such experience. When I first did this interview, the limitations of software certainly had an effect on how I constructed a course. I also had to consider what sort of computer systems most of the students had access to while taking the course. Each student’s experience while in a particular course needs to be equal to every other student’s experience as far as accessing and viewing the course Web site goes. Although each learner’s experience is unique, I couldn’t build a course that might only be fully accessible by half the students – all the students wouldn’t get the same opportunity for their individual journeys and experiences if that were the case.

Now that we use CSS and make sure all courses are W3C compliant, this is less of a concern. We no longer use the limiting software, and CSS allows for much more creativity. Plus, because each course validates with W3C, it’s identical in any browser. We’ve also surveyed our students, which told us that nearly all of them have high speed access to the Internet and that they are also using up-to-date Web browsers and software. So how the courses are presented is no longer limited as it once was. The Web standards we’ve developed aren’t really a limitation either – they are more of a guide so all of our course maintain a consistency so student can journey through them with great ease and confidence.

One example of this is the evolution the course designs have gone through. Since switching from the very limiting Publisher to Dreamweaver to CSS, all of our courses have evolved. Some took slow and multiple steps through their evolution, while others took grand leaps. We’re, fortunately, now at a place where all of our courses follow our Web standards to the letter and utilize CSS. This has provided a consistency through all of the courses that was lacking before. We are finally at a place where we’re only limited by the boundaries of our own creativity.

How do you attempt to modify the interface? How do you make it more friendly? More learner-centered? Do you design the course to build in reinforcement of elements you want to emphasize? Please describe one such experience. Tell in detail how you did it. Making each course user friendly is achieved by following our Web standards for presenting material and making sure the course material follows our Best Practices standards. Material needs to be presented in a logical order with clear objectives and assignments so the students know what is expected of them. Another important factor is easy navigation – students have to go how to travel through each course.

One course that definitely fits the criteria of a journey is Sleep and Dreams. I wanted this course to be dreamlike in its design and when I first designed the course, I had to manipulate the available software to achieve this state. That is no longer an issue with the new software and CSS.

Graphics for this course were manipulated, morphed, and distorted to simulate a dream quality. Because we dream in pictures, I originally wanted pictures to serve as navigation tools, so this course had navigation icons instead of the standard navigation box used in other courses. That is no longer the case with this course. After reading Don’t Make Me Think by Steve Krug and Designing with Web Standards by Jeffery Zeldman, I removed the image navigation. Dreamtime can be confusing enough; I didn’t need to create a navigation obstacle for some students who were unfamiliar with mouse over navigation.

This is a course is designed to be a place where each learner is safe in Dreamtime and will not be devoured by those who believe they hold authority over anyone or anything else. It is also a course where the student experiences learning as if in a dream. The pages that are chronicled here reflect some of Dreamtime.

This course is a story, not the only story of Dreamtime, but hopefully a story that will warm and inspire the dreamer/student. The students’ travels in this course take them through the world of Sleep and Dreams until they are ready to confront their own dreams with the understanding of the dreams’ purpose and meaning. It’s like riding a train through a Dreamscape while seeing a side of reality the world prefers to keep hidden – in a way, this Dreamscape is truly the world of the wrong side of the tracks, a world of old refrigerator boxes and tarpaper shacks, abandoned cars and washing machines, bicycles without wheels, and boarded-up buildings. It’s also a place where the Eagles circle, and the play of light through the dusty leaves swirls around the students’ minds like an eddy in the undercurrent.