Project Description

Instructional design and web development for Professor Brian Gennery.

This set of resources were created for a distance learning Programme in Pharmaceutical Science for a global Pharma company. The key instructional design principle of learning through doing is employed, asking students to take on the role of being the Chief Investigator for a trial studying a new drug on human volunteers.

We learn by testing our understanding of newly acquired knowledge, in other words by putting into action the theory we have learnt. Here, preceding lecture materials are supplemented with a series of simple but powerful branching scenarios that allow students to safely make mistakes.

From a development perspective, the technology employed is relatively low fidelity. More complex authoring tools such as Articulate Scenario are not used. This software is expensive and proprietary (further editing or updates require a software license). Instead, these resources use the free and open source Twine tool which outputs simple HTML. Twine makes the authoring of such scenarios quick and easy, using a simple graphical user-interface for organising decision points on a flowchart. The output, being pure HTML is easy to embellish and is device agnostic, easily accessible across a wide range of devices (small screen, low-end mobile phones, for example)

Software used: Twine, Adobe Dreamweaver / Photoshop.

Project Details

• Client: Department of Pharmacology
• Status: Completed Dec 2014
• Themes: branching scenarios, pbl, web design, mobile learning
• Team: Jerome Di Pietro