Leveling Up the Learning with Interactive Course Tools

Concurrent Session 10

Brief Abstract

Participants will explore a tool called H5P and participate in a collaborative brainstorming session to identify ways online activities can be implemented to support engagement and connections. During the workshop, participants will work together within an H5P activity that captures their ideas and creates an exportable document for future designs.

Presenters

Lead Presenter: Raul Pineda, The University of Texas at Austin | OnRamps

Raul Pineda is the instructional designer and education technologies manager for a dual enrollment program at The University of Texas at Austin known as OnRamps. In his position, Raul designs and builds distance learning courses in collaboration with university faculty and staff that give high school students the opportunity to experience college before college. In addition to this, he is a designer and contributor of a distance learning educator training catalog created by OnRamps. At the University of Texas at Austin, Raul has learned the importance of creating learner-centered educational experiences to provide students with engaging and effective ways to learn. As an instructional designer, Raul is interested in areas such as online accessibility, digital equity, and VR and AR experiences in education. Raul has a Masters of Arts in Curriculum and Instruction with a focus on Learning Technologies from The University of Texas at Austin and over 6 years of instructional design experience. Raul looks forward to innovating and making advances in online learning through his work with OnRamps.

Extended Abstract

Designing and developing engaging learning experiences is an important part of the instructional design process. For in-person, distance, and blended learning experiences, it is important to explore different possibilities for content delivery and select the best option that fits your learners' learning space, needs, skills, and goals. When educators and designers understand the numerous possibilities of activities, it opens the potential for creativity that can be used to effectively deliver content to any learner.

For OnRamps, a dual enrollment initiative at The University of Texas at Austin, two of our main focuses are our students' online learning and instructors' professional development experience. Through a brainstorming session such as the one participants will experience in this workshop, our designers generate a variety of ideas on how content can be delivered through online interactive activities; how it can support different learning pedagogies and andragogy; as well as how it can align and reach the learning goals of existing activities. With these ideas, educators and designers can work with other curriculum and subject matter experts to build synchronous and asynchronous activities that support engagement, and allow learners to build connections with the content and each other.