Reflections on My First Instructional Module

In the second to last week of LDT 504, I wrapped up and submitted the first instructional module I've ever created. Now that I have had a chance to take a breath – rather than spend every free moment of my time crawling back to Storyline for another miniscule change – I can reflect on how this creation process went for me. Overall, the process was engaging and fun, but it was not without bumps in the road. 

Going into this assignment, I knew I wouldn’t have a difficult time teaching myself how to use Storyline. It’s chaotically intuitive – PowerPoint on steroids. Moving from a ‘PowerPoint’ mindset to a ‘Storyline’ mindset was like moving from a 2D to 3D perspective, and the experience answered questions for me I’ve had in the past when reviewing or taking a training module. Before beginning this assignment, I could picture the process of animating a presentation, because that’s a normal part of PowerPoint. Beyond that, however, I couldn’t envision how the interactive elements of a module are pieced together. After reviewing the tutorials posted in class about triggers, stages, and variables, I found myself exploring a new world of possibilities both stressful and exciting. Using shortcuts, like copying and pasting triggers and stages, made the creation process intuitive for me, and kept me from becoming stuck in the weeds. 

However, I didn’t always escape getting bogged down in the details. On the night I embedded my introduction video, I found that during the transition between slides 1 and 2 a very unphotogenic thumbnail would flash before the video began. I spent two hours trying to figure out how to change the thumbnail – ‘set the poster frame,’ I learned – on my embedded video. I ran the mp4 through DaVinci Resolve, Adobe Premiere Pro, Panopto (as if that was going to work – but I was getting desperate), and Microsoft Clipchamp, before giving up and deactivating the transition between slides 1 and 2 entirely. I went to bed frustrated and defeated. The next morning, I sat down at my computer and had a passing thought that maybe the thumbnail could just be changed in Storyline, instead. Sure enough, one right-click and selection on the video, and the new thumbnail was set. I’ll never get that evening back – but that’s just how it goes sometimes. 

I also over-did it with some of my content. I rerecorded parts of my audio multiple times. I even rerecorded my introduction video, in a different setting and on a different day, because I didn’t like how I said one single word at the end of the original take. Devastatingly, in the new version I added an extra word in the title of the book The Lifecycle of a Plastic Bottle (I said, “Plastic water Bottle”), but I spent half an hour in DaVinci Resolve figuring out how to cut the word water out of the audio and smooth the visual transition. I had never made such a specific audio edit before, but I did a clean enough job that the edit didn’t even trip up the auto-captioning. I was proud of that.

Stepping back to look at the design process of this module as a whole, the most difficult aspect for me was probably wireframing the project. By the time I began working on the presentation itself, I had a solid understanding of where I was going and what I wanted to bring to life in my module. At the wireframe stage, however, I found myself exhausted by the repetitive process of notating out the content of each slide – what felt like a pointless haze of recurring elements such as that “the Next button fades into the screen.” However, I knew that frontloading the building-block process during the wireframe stage would pay off during the module creation process, and sure enough, I mostly just had to plug and play when it came time to work directly in Storyline. Even when I did make changes, I had a solid starting point upon which I could ground new ideas.  

I also asked my husband to take my training module, and afterwards, I had to tease out of him how he would perceive the quality of my design if he were, say, a parent of a child learning about plastic water bottles. Finally, I asked him the following: if he were given this module with no context, in what year would he think it was created? His answer: 2015. Okay – that’s not awful. I was a junior in undergrad in 2015. Maybe my brain has settled into that era of design and I haven’t figured out how to escape it yet. At least it didn’t look like it was from the 90s – but I can’t say I wasn’t disappointed that the module didn’t at least breach the 2020s in the eyes of an outside learner.

Regarding modernity though, and looking forward to the future of eLearning, the question of whether something should be done just because it can be done will continue to be pertinent and critical. At one point while I was creating my module, I googled the name of the foundation in the design case I had selected, to see if it was a real foundation. The first search result was a link to a previous student who had posted his version of this exact module to his website portfolio. Out of curiosity, I clicked through a few slides of his module, and initially felt disappointed in myself. He had used an AI-generated, animated talking head to narrate his entire module, and it just looked so professional. The AI's speech patterns were a little off-putting, but it looked so modern.

However, as I watched more, the uncanny valley of the avatar started to feel creepier to me. I showed it to my husband and made a passing comment that the module looked better than mine. His reaction surprised me. No, he said – he thought the exact opposite. This, from the guy who just mercilessly dated my module to 2015! But it was clear to him that someone had just paid for a talking head AI to narrate the content, and that immediately turned him off of the module. It seemed inauthentic and disingenuous to him. Picture if he were an actual learner tasked with completing this module – based on his reaction to the design, I doubt he would have retained much of the content at all. 

I share this exchange, to say: imagine thinking that the implementation of new technology like this is progress. Just because an AI feature is available for purchase doesn’t mean it should be used in place of well-planned, theory-driven design. In a decade or so, once generative AI and augmented reality have become the new norm in our society, the problems we will encounter with eLearning will still be more of the same. There’s no stopping it, uncanny valley or not – AI is here to stay. But this tech should be used like salt. Even the flakiest, smokiest salt will ruin a dish if it is overused. It’s our job as instructional designers to reign in both our organizations and ourselves, when we are tempted to go heavy on the seasoning.