Rapid Prototyping for E-Learning
In the presentation I gave for my Current Ed Tech Trends course topic earlier this year, I had mentioned the fact that the development of the Graphical User Interface made the transition from entering commands via a keyboard from a cognitive process (knowing and typing) to a more visual process (clicking and dragging). Therefore, metaphors had to be developed that made sense to end users. Along with a trash bin (for deleting files), came the standard widgets we see today. (Text boxes, buttons, radio buttons, check boxes, etc.) Integrated development environments (IDE’s) offered a method to create an interface using the exact same tools and widgets as the eventual produced final product.
Typically the process of designing an interface is not hard. If you’ve taken any authoring program courses (Director, Flash, etc.) you will see a lot of the same things and ideas. You laid out what widgets you wanted on your 2-dimensional interface for your program, and then switched to the code generated by the IDE so you can make them come to life.
It is for this reason you can model what the look and feel of the interface is going to look before the code and logic behind it exists. To see what this looks like, I’ll point you to a resource for one of Adobe’s key technologies, Flex.
Anyone who has taken EDT 504 (Instructional Software design), might have felt overwhelmed with having to learn Flash from the standpoint that it is a timeline-based animation tool that has only within the last few years of its existence been transformed into a learning too. For a brief while, there was a version called Flash Professional which allowed you to break out of the timeline-based animation mode and actually focus on “screens” of information. My impression was that it was never that successful.
Where Flex comes in is that it is more of a programmers tool. However if you want to play with the demo, it isn’t too hard to come up with a screen layout of where you want to place buttons, widgets, etc. To me it is a step between PowerPoint as a rapid-dev tool, and Flash.
My take on it is that as instructional designers become more accustomed to seeing programming code within their design work, regardless of their prowess with writing code, they can at least understand how their design can easily interface with code and logic that talks to an LMS or other system to do something intelligent.
For non-programmers who wouldn’t even dream of wanting to see programming code behind their Instructional Design product, there are other tools. In our EDT 504 course, (which primarily pushes Flash as the authoring environment of choice for the course) my group used PowerPoint to do a screen-by-screen prototype, and then exported it to Flash format using Keynote (Apple’s proprietary slide presentation software). We imported the PowerPoint file into Keynote and then dumped it out to the Flash format. The navigation was weird but we eventually got it to work quite nicely.
I’m wondering, what is everyone else’s exposure to rapid prototyping for instructional design work, and what have you seen being used in the field?
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