How to rid your garden of common tomato pests

Updated on June 16, 2025

Assignment background

Uh-Oh, Tomato! is an eLearning course about common tomato pests and natural ways to repel them. 

I built it in 2015 during my graduate studies. It was the final project for a course titled, “Creating self-paced online learning modules.”

What stood out most about this assignment were the stipulations, which made this one of the most involved eLearning projects I’ve had to date:

1. No templates allowed: Every component in the course had to be built from from scratch over the course of one semester.
2. Course authoring software requirements: We were required to use Adobe Captivate. Captivate 9 was newly released at the start of our term.
3. Web hosting versus LMS setup: The final project had to be hosted in our portfolio site, meaning expanding hosting capabilities and establishing a file transfer protocol (FTP) server.

Beyond these requirements, the assignment was open-ended. I chose a topic of personal interest: keeping pests away from my tomato crop.

Design guide

The document below details all course design elements and references. You can also view it in a new browser tab.

Want to take the course yourself?

Select the image below to launch the course in a new tab, or visit this link. Thank you for your patience as I work to upgrade this site’s capabilities for embedded courses. 🙂

If I did it all over again…

I received high marks on this assignment in late 2015. Even so, when I review it as part of my portfolio years later, there’s a lot I would change.

Here are some current observations:

1. The assessment and evaluation strategies need to be improved. There are some knowledge checks based on the learning objectives. However, there’s no way to verify that this course actually met its goals. Understanding the target audience better would be the first step to crafting meaningful assessment and evaluation strategies.
2. This isn’t the best format for the learning objectives or intended application of the learning. It seems unrealistic to expect that my target audience of “your average amateur gardener” would opt for this instructional format over something simpler and easier to reference in the field (or raised bed, in this case). Again, understanding the target audience better would be the first step to defining the best format for the learning intervention. Spoiler alert: it’s probably not an eLearning at all.
3. There are accessibility issues. The UI isn’t responsive, audio is limited, and there are embedded interactions that aren’t accessible to all users. The navigation isn’t intuitive. The font is hard to read. The course would need to be completely overhauled in order to make it accessible.
4. The aesthetics need work. Speaking of the font… wow, it really makes me cringe! I had my professors’ approval to use it, since it fit the theme (“let me share my notes with you”). If I did it over again, I’d opt for a more modern visual treatment.