Traditionally, instructional designers were responsible for both content and design when creating e-Learning courses. With technological advances, multimedia designers should be included in the design and development process. Multimedia designers bring skills to ensure functional and effortless user interface.
For e-Learning, user interface is particularly critical as the learning experience and interface designs are substantially intertwined. With the acceleration of learning technologies, the focus on the need for effective UI and UX design in higher education has become a necessity to ensure that interfaces are not confusing to students. Course developers have previously designed simplistic courses which failed to foster learner retention and/or self-assessments. It is easy to neglect the learner experience when designing an e-Learning course that focuses only on housing content. Other factors, such as graphics, audio, and interactive presentations are essential in designing dynamic e-Learning courses. In addition to designing for learning content retention, multimedia designers must also consider how learners will navigate within the course through effective user-interface design techniques.
With a Modified SAM model, the course development team emphasizes student performance by focusing on learner experience, engagement, and motivation. During each design phase, the instructional designer, as project manager, brings a set of challenges to each team member, while providing options, strategies, and tools for each team to be successful. Unlike other instructional design models, our course design model requires multimedia designers’ participation in each step of the course development process from Preparation to Iterative Development. Experienced, qualified multimedia designers on a SAM team are responsible for developing a visual concept. Driving the communication and providing creative solutions to practical and conceptual problems are also areas that the multimedia designer lead.
In this presentation, we will discuss how the effective user interface design contributes to the success of an online course. We will also demonstrate strategies and concepts frequently employed within the SAM e-Learning development framework. By applying the modified SAM model during the development process, instructional and multimedia designers, as well as content experts, will create effective e-Learning materials, activities, and assessments.
Participant Engagement
To showcase the effectiveness of SAM, it is important for the participants to see the inefficiency of courses designed without using this model. We will first present a course designed without the assistance of a multimedia designer. We will then take the same course, using the SAM model to incorporate multimedia principles.
We will walk the participants through the development process by demonstrating how to create a course prototype based upon the SAM model. Following the demonstration, participants should have a clear understanding of the three main course development phases and the importance of integrating the multimedia designer throughout the process.