11085

11085

General Session - Conference Presentation Only (no formal paper)

Translating Tough Policy Into Easy Learning – A Drupal & Flash Story
Natalie Laderas-Kilkenny, Educational Services Provider/Non-profit, Portland, OR, USA, natalie.laderas@educationnorthwest.org Richard Melo, Portland, OR, richard.melo@educationnorthwest.org

Take some federal regulations for volunteers, add a healthy dose of student financial aid lingo, squeeze in complex info on a couple of new student loan relief programs, sprinkle in tax policy, and you’ve created yourself a recipe for disaster in an online learning environment.

At Education Northwest we took a heavy chunk of regulatory content and created an online resource that is lively, engaging, fun -- and most important, learner-centered. Our project team was tasked with developing an interactive resource in Drupal that included animated stories in Flash.

The resource is a website that helps AmeriCorps members and VISTA volunteers sort out the myriad possibilities and restrictions regarding their post-service tuition or student loans financial benefit. The site can be found at http://edaward.org.

This site is designed for easy application for people with a specific question in mind. But answering questions is not the site’s only purpose. There are numerous educational and financial opportunities people who land on our site may not be aware of. The goal is to entice our audience to stay on the site long enough to learn about other possibilities open to them. We do this by framing the navigation according to what our audience wants (based on our research) and a series of comics and flash animations that draw people in.

During this session, we’ll cover the thinking behind this project, the tools and the process for creating it with an emphasis on how the same instructional design principles and process can be used for different content in different contexts.

Novice, Intermediate, All Audiences Online learning resource Drupal Flash