Updated on May 7, 2024
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:
- No templates allowed: Every component in the course had to be built from from scratch over the course of one semester.
- Course authoring software requirements: We were required to use Adobe Captivate. Captivate 9 was newly released at the start of our term.
- 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.
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 reflections:
- The assessment and evaluation strategy is weak. There are some embedded assessments related to the learning objectives, but there is no real way to prove or tell whether the course has helped someone mitigate garden pests. This is especially true with such a broad audience. If it were in a more specific setting, such as commercial agriculture, then perhaps the course might correlate to a reduction in crop loss for plots tended by employees who completed Tomato Pest Mitigation Enablement™ (obviously, the course would need a more professional title in a commercial setting).
- This is not 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).
- There are accessibility issues. A republish in 2023 would require significant rework and testing to ensure full accessibility. The course is not device-responsive, there is limited audio, and it relies heavily on embedded interactions that may not be accessible to all users. The navigation isn’t intuitive. The font is hard to read.
- Speaking of the font… wow, it really makes me cringe! Back in 2015, I got written approval to use a script font since it fit with the overall theme and approach of the course: “let me share my notes with you…” I would opt for a much cleaner visual treatment on the course if I did it over again.
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. 🙂
