Keywords

Internship, Foreign Language, Immersive, Experiential Learning, Minimalism, BYU Online

Description

The initial request of creating a BYU Online Canvas course for the GERM 399R and RUSS 399R internship course came from the German and Russian Departments on BYU campus. The client requested a course redesign based on student data from previous iterations of the internship course which indicated a decline in student satisfaction due to poor organization, difficult navigation, and the large quantity of homework.

The new product consisted of two courses (GERM 399R and RUSS 399R) housed within the Canvas learning management system (LMS) and was informed by a learner analysis, qualitative interviews, and iterative prototyping.

The improved internship course provided easier navigation to weekly course assignments, and each clickable button on the homepage included a photo of a local landmark in the student’s host country. Each assignment was vetted based on pre-existing data and an experiential learning framework was utilized, as well as various minimalistic design principles, to ensure relevance to onsite learning and usefulness for student professional development. The final course had 13 modules: a launch-pad module, a module for each assignment (10 total), and two survey modules (mid-course pilot feedback and end of course pilot feedback).

Students encountered every assignment just one or two clicks away from their homepage with minimal scrolling. Though outside the scope of this project, data collected from the pilot midcourse survey showed improvements in every measured area, and the satisfied client has since reached out for help creating and editing other internship courses.

The ten assignments were created and scoped to fit into the following learning objectives:

Network and develop work relationships in their target language and location.
Demonstrate verbal proficiency and understanding of the language of their chosen field.
Identify and understand key global competencies pertaining to their specific professional sphere.
Communicate and translate their internship work into a marketable experience for professional contexts.

Streaming Media

Media is loading