Intuitive Eating

Summary

This eLearning concept piece familiarizes learners with the concept, benefits, and 10 foundational principles of the intuitive eating approach.

Target Audience: The average learner is a female-identifying person between the ages of 25-55 located in the United States

Responsibilities: Needs Analysis, Instructional Design, Storyboarding, Visual Design, eLearning Development

Tools: Articulate Storyline 360, Canva, SCORM Cloud, Google Forms

The Problem

This eLearning concept piece was created for a hypothetical community organization, Intuitive Eating Champions, to inform and educate new community members about the concept of intuitive eating. The course is intended to be offered as an introductory eLearning module on the organization’s website. The organization assumes all learners taking the course have an interest in the topic of intuitive eating but are not familiar with the foundational principles of intuitive eating. Given the amount of misinformation online and across social media regarding diets as well as the intuitive eating approach, this course provides straightforward, research-based information about the concept, benefits, and principles of intuitive eating.

The Solution

My solution is an eLearning course that can be completed in under 20 minutes. The course features 4 knowledge checks and a brief final assessment. After completing the course learners will be able to:

  • Identify the 10 key principles of intuitive eating

  • Distinguish between physical and emotional hunger cues

  • Apply strategies to challenge thoughts that label foods as “good” or “bad”

  • Describe at least 3 differences between the intuitive eating approach and a diet

The Process

I leveraged the Backwards Design approach to design the course curriculum. I was inspired to try this approach after reading Understanding by Design by Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe early in my Master’s program. Following the three stages of Backwards Design, first I identified my desired results. This involved considering the overall learning goals then writing measurable learning objectives using Bloom’s Taxonomy.

Next, I determined acceptable evidence of learner understanding and proficiency of my learning objectives. To accomplish this, I identified assessment topics and drafted quiz questions accordingly. In the final course, I used four of these questions as knowledge checks spaced throughout the course to break up the instructional content.

Finally, I selected instructional strategies and planned the learning activities based on the previous two phases. When identifying how to deliver the course content, I considered the following questions from Vanderbilt University’s Understanding by Design guide:

  1. What enabling knowledge (facts, concepts, principles) and skills (processes, procedures, strategies) will students need in order to perform effectively and achieve desired results?

  2. What activities will equip students with the needed knowledge and skills?

  3. What will need to be taught and coached, and how should it best be taught, in light of performance goals?

  4. What materials and resources are best suited to accomplish these goals?

Design Document

I documented my learning objectives, design choices, practice and assessment activities in a design document. This design document served as a high-level outline and plan for the course while the text-based storyboard refined these concepts into a concrete plan for development in Articulate Storyline.

Design Document Excerpt

Text-based Storyboard

Next, I created a text-based storyboard in Microsoft PowerPoint to refine the course content. Although I developed the course myself in Articulate Storyline, I wrote the storyboard with enough detail so that it could’ve been given to another eLearning developer to develop in the authoring tool. My storyboard featured the following items:

  • Course text

  • Buttons

  • Programming notes

  • Visual media specified by file name

  • HTML color codes

Text-based Storyboards

Development

I developed this course using Articulate Storyline 360 as the authoring tool. All images were sourced from Articulate’s content library and edited directly in Storyline or in Canva.

Design Features

10-Tab Interaction

To introduce learners to the 10 principles of intuitive eating, I created a 10 tabbed interaction. Learners click through each number to reveal a short description introducing that principle. This interactive activity was designed according to the Pre-Training Principle in Mayer’s Multimedia Learning Theory. According to Clark and Mayer (2016), the Pre-Training Principle “encourages instructors to introduce key terms and concepts before asking learners to engage with the actual lesson material to reduce cognitive load.  This process helps learners progress to more advanced thinking as a lesson or course proceeds. Evidence suggests pre-training can help improve knowledge transfer and retention.” I also selected relevant instructional graphics to add visual interest to each tab.

10-Tab Interaction

Sliding Hunger Scale

My favorite interactive element in this course is the sliding hunger-fullness scale I created to introduce Principle 2 (Honor Your Hunger). The hunger-fullness scale ranges from 1 (ravenous, weak, dizzy) to 10 (painfully full, sick, nauseous). To create this interaction I added a slider with instructional text to the base layer and added a slide layer for each point on the scale. Each layer features a text description along with an image of a female character illustrating the hunger/fullness level of that point on the scale.

Sliding Hunger Scale

Results & Evaluation

I published the course to the SCORM cloud and shared the course along with a feedback survey with a group of pilot testers both within and outside the instructional design community.

To evaluate this course, I used the first two levels (Level 1: reaction & Level 2: learning) of the Kirkpatrick Model of Evaluation. Since this concept piece was created for a hypothetical organization, I could not create evaluation instruments to assess Level 3, behavior change, and Level 4, organizational results. However, for real client projects I would certainly develop evaluation instruments to determine if the learning resulted in real performance/behavior change and, ultimately, impacted the intended business results/KPIs.

To collect data about learner’s immediate reaction, I created a reaction survey that included the following questions:

  • How interesting was this lesson? (5-point scale)

  • How well did you understand what you were supposed to learn? (5-point scale)

  • How confident did you feel when completing the assessment portion of the course? (5-point scale)

  • How would you improve this unit of eLearning? (open-response)

  • What did you like best about this course? (open-response)

  • What did you like least about this course? (open response)

Some feedback learners shared about the course:

  • “This was INCREDIBLE. I have been studying nutrition and macro/micronutrients for a few years now and this was incredibly informative but in a fun and casual way. The course was very uplifting and your addition of resources had me doing some of my own research by the end of it.”

  • “I really liked being guided through the topic - it was interesting and held my attention the whole time. I was excited to continue/complete the course.”

Altogether, survey data revealed that the course was well received by learners. When asked how interesting the lesson was, 62.5% of learners responded very interesting, 25% of learners responded interesting, and only one learner (12.5%) reported neutral sentiments. More specifically, learners provided positive feedback on the visual design and overall layout and flow of the course. When asked what they liked best about the course, three learners pointed towards the interactive course activities.

Constructive Feedback

Learner survey feedback revealed a number of course elements that could be improved. One anticipated theme that emerged from the survey was adding audio to the course. Since this was my first project developed in Storyline, I deliberately chose to omit audio from the course. Instead, I leveraged Clark and Mayer’s (2016) guidelines for multimedia learning with text-only to craft an instructional strategy for this course. Going forward, if I were to revise this course, I would add audio elements such as narration to the course. More specifically, I could replace text guidance from my mentor character, Renita, with narrated audio guidance.

Learners also spotted a handful of technical bugs that I did not notice in my previous testing. For example, two learners expressed difficulty with navigating out of an infographic displayed on a light box slide. To remedy this issue, I added an obvious manual close button to the slide.

Another technical issue two learners flagged was the submission and feedback to my drag and drop quiz question. It appears that learners did not drag the correct objects to their appropriate location and struggled to submit the question. To improve my course, I re-constructed the question from the bottom up to display only one drag and drop item per slide.

Revised Drag & Drop Interaction

Final Reflections

Altogether, I am pleased with the final product - especially considering this was the first full course I built in Articulate Storyline 360. With this project, I had the opportunity to explore different development features such as designing a custom drag and drop, creating a unique slider interaction, and experimenting with slide layers. Since publishing this project, my confidence and technical skills in Storyline development have both skyrocketed. This technical growth (in instructional design, visual design, and Storyline development) can be seen in my Animal Massage Therapy eLearning course.

That said, I’ve identified a few changes to improve the instructional effectiveness and visual design if I were to revise this course. First, I would break down several slides to reduce the amount of text on the screen at once. These edits would reduce cognitive load for learners as they can focus processing the limited text and graphics on each slide.

Second, I would remove the player and create custom navigation buttons to improve the user experience. Since developing advanced Storyline skills following the completion of this project, my preference is to disable the course player and create custom navigation so all course actions take place within the course window. I also feel this choice enhances the visual design with a cleaner, more minimal interface.