UTP online courses

During 2021, UTP decided to redesign two online remote courses: Civics and Ethics and Thermodynamics. I participated as the lead visual designer for the project. These courses used a combination of readings, interactive presentations, web pages within the LMS, animated videos and other assorted elements to help students learn. Civics and Ethics was completely redesigned and Thermodynamics only had 3 out of 18 weeks redesigned.

Figure 1: Select pages from Civics and Ethics readings.

I decided to use a more minimalist style to emphazise the actual content in the pieces - mainly to encourage reading and reviewing them multiple times without distraction.

I was especially concerned with the typesetting, to make sure it was highly legible and had adequate contrast.

Figure 2: Template used to give assignment instructions for the course.

In order to introduce some visual variety and increase engagement with the material, I decided to compliment the simple visuals with some illustrations (made 'em myself!). I decided to use a friendly and organic style for the these, to be able to re-use it often and quickly but still make the charcters different and human enough to immerse the students in the narratives they were presented with. This was especially important in the Ethics and Civics course, where empathizing with specific situations was a key part of the learning process.

That course specifically also required many banners and character illustrations for interactive presentations and videos. You can see some of them on my Illustration page.

Figure 3: Another reading from the Civics and Ethics course. Here's a downloadable PDF in case the reader doesn't work?.

Besides more editorial pieces, I also designed and programmed a couple Storyline presentations. These also include illustrations and some more interactive elements to encourage learning.

Figure 4: Storyline about the concept of citizenship.

In some cases, I decided to use photomontages and collages to explain the more complex topics in an entertaining, fun way that caught student's attention.

Figure 5: Photomontages for a Storyline presentation about the Milgram Experiment.
Figure 6: Slides and illustrations for a case study about multiculturalism.

The LMS we used to host these courses allowed us to create basic HTML pages to offer content as well. Since I'm fairly adept at creating basic HTML/CSS pages, I pitched the idea of making basic pages to combine interactive and static elements in simple bundle and offer some more variety in content for students to engage with. My team liked the idea so I went ahead and designed some simple pages along with our instructional designer to ensure that each page had enough material to achieve the learning objectives of the course and that we maintained coherence between what is presented visually and the content.

I designed and implemented the pages, along with any kind of illustration, banner or interactive element that was included in them. I liked the end results quite a bit!

Figure 7: Screenshots from the pages created for the Thermodynamics course. They included .gifs and practice problems for the students to review.

Generally speaking, this was a really fun project to work on, even though it required a LOT of work under pressure and very tight deadlines. I feel I learnt a lot about designing and creating multimedia interactive pieces. Also, I'm very glad my team had enough confidence in my work to award me with plenty of creative freedom over the material. The results after publishing the course were pretty good too, the NPS for Civics and Ethics got a 10% increase in a single semester. Thermodynamics didn't get a noticeable increase, but we did only intervene in 3 weeks from the entire 18 week long course. So I'm not too mad at those results. Overall, not bad!