Instructor led courses delight through story & design

We were tasked with making seven Microsoft Office certification courses for secondary school students. We chose to focus content and student tasks around a fictional farm, “Munson’s Pickles and Preserves.” Students were “interns” learning to create materials like documents, spreadsheets, and databases for farm operations. My role was to run the media development for all courses, defining the vision and assuring that all assets were aligned.

An infographic to show the connection between different documents included in curriculum from the introductory materials through the lesson plans and evaluations.

Context

We made seven courses all linked through a common theme. The courses were delivered originally through the Microsoft Imagine Academy teacher portal as a series of documents distributed to over 15,000 schools. Later the courses were moved to Microsoft Learn for wider distribution.

This curriculum development project had more documents than I could count—luckily someone else was in charge of document tracking. I created infographics so teachers and students would know what documents were needed at which phase of the project. Each course has multiple modules, which include a guide for the teacher and the student as well the lessons, projects, evaluations, and other materials.

Our approach to video

Excerpt from Creating for everyone, made by our team for the Microsoft Word course.

We prioritized creating two original videos for each course. One taught a concept that is applicable to using the software, like the video called Creating for everyone, for the Microsoft Word course. The other used a timelapse effect to take learners through a fast tour of how a document is made with the software so that they get a glimpse of what is possible before learning how to use the tool.

Excerpt from Microsoft Excel in action, used in the introductory Excel course.

My role

My role included:

  • Creating a brand for all courses that aligned with Microsoft brand.

  • Developing the approach and budgets for all videos.

  • Hiring animators and art directing all animated videos.

  • Creating templates.

  • Writing video scripts.

  • Doing some of the design, illustration, and video editing.

  • Teaching the instructional designers and subject matter experts on how to adhere to the brand and create quality assets.

A sample template slide from the curriculum.
Storyboard for Creating for Everyone, an animated video created for the Microsoft Word course.
A slide to show how the fictitious farm was described for the course developers.

Additional instructor led projects include:

  • Instructional designer for a three-day workshop based on the work of Tina Seelig, Stanford d.School professor.

  • Instructional designer for a sales enablement summit. I worked closely with subject matter experts to present a session on the discovery process.

  • I collaborated with three other authors and a team of animators and designers at Sublime Media to create this widely distributed course in computer science for secondary school students.

  • Instructional designer for a 40-hour curriculum to teach coding skills and app development to secondary school students.

  • Instructional designer and graphic designer for a 5-hour extension curriculum for Hour of Code, introducing entrepreneurship to secondary school students.