Ara
Developing online student support resources
Ara Institute of Canterbury challenged themselves to improve student retention and achievement. The Learning Services team recognised that improving the presentation of their online student support resources would help them meet this challenge. Like-Minded worked with the Learning Services team to present their existing information in an interactive way that students can access easily online and on demand.
Bringing it inline and online in one hit
Learning Services focus on teaching or supporting essential study skills and the team had already developed numerous individual resources that were accessed in multiple ways, presented in a variety of formats and in some instances, the resources were not currently available to students. However, students were not taken through a structured learning pathway, which limited the value of the experience.
Together we evolved their existing resources into online content, developed using the Adapt authoring tool, with some Articulate Storyline 2 for the more complex interactives. It gave them a large volume of quality resources, covering 20+ topics.
Same outcome any way you look at it
Our broad range of skills, working alongside the Ara team with their expertise, meant new learning in a variety of formats, using a range of online authoring tools. The bite-size and modular learning experiences allow the students to read, listen, watch and interact with content.
Consistency was key. Each topic was presented as the same six sections, which take the student through a guided pathway of learning and gave them choice that meets with different learning styles and different levels of prior knowledge.
A quick explanation for someone who had never encountered the topic before and provided an awareness of the topic, and the ability to put the fundamentals into practice
Examples of work, video lectures or video examples of the task in action. This gave visual learners a breakdown of the topic
Formative questions for the students to quickly check their understanding of the topic
Links to other websites, online courses, that would immerse themselves in the information if they wanted a deeper level of understanding.
Access to resources that the student might find helpful to print or templates that students could populate with their own content.
Information required to contact a learning service advisor.
The numbers tell the story
Our inclusion of Google analytics coding to each of the resources has already shown that students are responding positively to the new way of learning and locating Ara study support materials.
New tools are always fun!
This was our first client using Adapt as their authoring tool of choice and we wanted to create a novel visual experience, and one that distinguished it from other lower-end authoring tools that might otherwise have been selected. It’s always a challenge to learn quickly, but at the same time we were able to highlight some of the unique selling points.
Adapt helped us give the students something new but was still highly effective, and the team something they could work with and develop over time without being tied to external providers.