TEACH: Centering Culture

Online Cultural Competency Training

Context

Designed as part of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Inclusive

Excellence Initiative grant awarded to USU, this training helps faculty, students, and community partners to embrace diversity and cultural understanding - particularly towards Native Americans. I led a team of three to redesign this course and transition it to a more accessible LMS.

Tools

Canvas

Teachable

Adobe Illustrator

Details

The transition of this course had several areas of adaptation necessary. Our team first listed and prioritized the educators' needs:

LMS choice and transition
Revision of content
Reconsideration of interaction style
Logo design
Photos and graphics update

After compiling detailed task lists as a team in tandem with the educators, I delegated our workload and maintained communication flow in weekly meetings and through Slack. All team members had a hand in design choices and visual critiques to ensure quality products were presented for educator approval.

In addition to my leadership position,

I also took the role of lead visual

designer. Important tasks in this role

were logo design, graphic design,

palette and font selection, and page

layout. We also produced a style

guide outlining all design choices

and instructions our educators can

follow to create visually appealing, user friendly pages within their course after our contract has expired. In terms of content material, this course is a standout among other online cultural competency modules and we wanted our visuals to have the same impact as its brilliantly-designed content.

Insights

This course redesign was my culminating project for my MEd at Utah State University and I couldn't have chosen a better or more timely piece of work. Our educators are delighted with the finished product. I was able to fully fuse my learning and visual design abilities, learned how to efficiently manage a multi-talented team, and further improved my educator communication skills. I have equipped our educators with the skills they need to update and adapt this course with confidence on visuals. Overall this has been both the most interesting and beneficial project I've contributed to as an instructional designer. Details here!