Energy Solutions Arena: Serving Persons with Disabilities

Serving Persons with Disabilities is training designed for the Energy Solutions Arena located in Salt Lake City, Utah. It is specifically meant for ushers, who interact with persons with disabilities regualarly at NBA games, concerts and other events. The training consists of three parts: 1) A PowerPoint presentation, which includes sound and video, meant to used with a projector 2) an instructor's guide, including notes and possible questions to ask, and 3) a handout for learners. The instruction was developed with two other instructional designers. I was in charge of project management, research and writing. I was also in charge of formatting the instructor's guide. Additionally, I assisted in interviewing ushers and management regarding current policy.

eduCommons Documentation and Screencasts

You may or may not have heard of MIT's decision to make its course material available to anyone online. This groundbreaking decision started the OpenCourseWare movement in which other universities have made their course material available online. eduCommons is the software that runs MIT's OpenCourseWare website along with a dozen others. My responsibility was to update the documentation to better help users who are adding new courses to their university's eduCommons installation. I created a twenty-three page instruction guide called "eduCommons: A Guide to Getting Started" and made it available on the eduCommons website both as web pages and as a PDF document. Then I created nine screencasts that correspond with the sections in the eduCommons guide. Later, I added one screencast about installing eduCommons on the Ubuntu operating system. Note: The website configuration specified the use of SWF files for the screencasts. If I had a choice in the delivery platform, the movies would have been in a Flash or QuickTime.

The eduCommons guide was created in Word and the screenshots were prepared using Photoshop Elements. I used several different programs for the screencasts. They were captured using Snapz Pro X2 for Mac OS X and then converted and edited using QuickTime Pro. Both the opening and closing sequences were done in Final Cut Pro, exported and then added to the movies using QuickTime Pro. The QuickTime movies were converted to FLVs using Flash 8 and then converted to SWFs using a program called Super.

ContentLicensing and IMS Transport

In the summer of 2007 I worked for a non-profit organization called COSL (Center for Open and Sustainable Learning). One of COSL's main projects is eduCommons (which is described in greater detail above). EduCommons runs on a content management system called Plone. However, Plone does not have all the necessary components to make eduCommons run, so two plug-ins were developed: ContentLicensing and IMS Transport.

ContentLicensing is a plug-in that automatically displays copyright information at the bottom of each page in Plone. Administrators of the site can change what license is displayed and, if they allow it, the creators of the page can choose a license. I wrote documentation for other Plone users on how to install the ContentLicensing plug-in for their own Plone installation. I used Word to write the documentation, then hand-coded the HTML and created the screenshots in Photoshop Elements.

IMS packages are zip files with special instructions located in a XML file. They are most commonly used with WebCT/Blackboard courses. IMS Transport allows Plone developers and administrators to import IMS packages while maintaining the links between pages. I developed documentation using Word and Photoshop Elements.

Knoten Brot

Knoten Brot was a guide to creating a type of swiss bread. The project was a group effort with four other people contributing content and layout design. We chose a cooking topic because it would be a straightforward procedural task and we believed the subject matter would be interesting to the general population. My primary responsibility for this assignment was to write the first draft of the instruction (with group members making suggestions for improvements). I also wrote and edited parts of weekly reports to the professor. I used a combination of Microsoft Word and NeoOffice, which is a free alternative to Word, to write/edit the report and instructions.

Open Water Script

Open Water was an instructional video about water purification that was produced by myself and three other classmates. We felt that a video about about water purification would be useful and that the subject could be presented in an entertaining manner. My first responsibility was to write the script for the video. I used Google Docs to write the script and share it with my group members. Additionally, I was responsible for writing the content for the Open Water website. Note: The website is currently unavailable as it is being moved to a new server.

APA Guide

The APA Guide was a project meant to instruct students on how to properly cite sources in APA format. It was done by myself and one other classmate. The instruction was designed to also help students identify where the necessary information for citations could be found. I researched the information and wrote the instructions. My project partner helped find examples and designed the layout of the instruction. We conducted one usability test in which five people went through the instruction and corrections were made based on the participants' feedback.