Master’s Research Project: Diabetes Self-Management Learning Module
Background
This e-learning application was created by myself and Katie Harvey for Dr. David Drozek to support patients in his lifestyle management clinic. It also served as the deliverable for my master’s research project which investigated best practices in web-based online module design for diabetes self-management education.
Media: Adobe Illustrator, Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Fresco, Adobe InDesign, Articulate Storyline, and Unity Game Engine.
Client: Dr. David Drozek
Audience: Patients diagnosed with prediabetes or type II diabetes
Period: June 2020 - May 2021
Research, ideation, and planning
Once Katie and I submitted our research proposals, we set to work making our project a reality! First we created a master schedule and a science content map.
Content map summary:
Learners will understand what fiber is and its benefits.
Learners will better understand the available treatments for lifestyle diseases.
Learners will have an improved understanding of long-term health and weight outcomes as a result of increased fiber in their diet.
Learners will gain experience preparing a variety of plant-based meals.
Katie and I had an immense amount of fun ideating on what our deliverable could be. We came up with a lot of different concepts including some wild ones like a farming radish mascot and an ever-hungry pancreas! We evaluated our ideas on how effectively they communicated our learning goals and how effectively they followed the literature reviewed in our proposals. In the end, we came up with a storybook style learning module that took the user on a personal journey to self change.
Pre-production
Katie and I organized our content into what would become the four chapters of our interactive experience. A challenge for this project in particular is that lifestyle change is a complex thing to ‘teach’. Unlike most learning, which involves the learner adding to existing schemas, lifestyle change asks learners to rewrite schemas deeply rooted in the learner’s daily routine. For this reason we included a final chapter, which is an interactive game that asks the participant to put what they have learned into practice.
Once we settled on our project’s central ideas, we created a script and a style guide, although many of the look and feel decisions were totally up to us, we worked closely with Dr. Drozek to ensure that the content we were teaching aligned with his existing curriculum.
We created a narrative story that re-contextualized diabetes as a challenge to be faced and overcome through lifestyle management. Published focus groups data on individuals with type II diabetes gave us a framework to make the module feel personalized to its audience. To do this we infused themes from those focus groups such as acknowledging feelings of anxiety and loneliness, and including family in the narrative.
Production
Katie is a talented watercolor artist and she did the illustrations and coloring. I can’t take credit for any of that phenomenal work, but I can take credit for coming up with the idea of using the watercolor style … so at least I have that going for me. Because Katie had her plate full, pun intended, I set to work on much of the behind-the-scenes tasks: animating Katie’s illustrations in After Effects, integrating our assets in Articulate Storyline, and coding the interactive portion in Unity.
A particular challenge of the Unity module was making some food items stack and others swap. This was a fairly complex logical puzzle that required great attention to detail while writing the necessary IF statements in C#.
I layered turbulent displace effects in After Effects to create the line boil and water color bloom.
Final deliverable
This project was a seriously great experience. I am very glad that I had the opportunity to work with Katie. We learned to plan, communicate, and compromise. Working collaboratively and having opportunities to brainstorm solutions was a breath of fresh air, and something I strive to do more of in my professional career. The end result was an amalgamation neither of us could have done on our own.
Bonus
Katie and I are also proud winners of the highly coveted Margot & Calvin awards! Yes, it is true that they are the children of our research advisor Karen, and we did specifically ask Karen to see if they would make them for us, but nonetheless we consider the awards a crowning achievement in our graduate careers!