marinade seated: Quality Tutorial Designer's Checklist

Wednesday, November 14, 2012

Quality Tutorial Designer's Checklist | Langwitches Blog

Helping students become quality Tutorial Designers has been on my mind and agenda lately. The reasons are plentiful, from the train of thought ?if you can teach it, you know it?, being a vital skill in the 21st century, Alan November?s work ?Who owns the Learning??/ ?Digital Learning Farm? to tutorials being an important piece in the self-motivated and self-directed learning of our times.

Teaching, nor creating (digital) tutorials, may come natural to everyone. There are are several skills involved. which are valuable for our students to learn.

communication
not only understanding content and process, but being able to express and communicate them to someone else. The communication can be accomplished in a variety of media.
collaboration
curating all student created tutorials in one place (ex. wiki) will create a hub, where students can search for tutorials of content, that they need a refresher on and? it creates a depository for students in future years to come.
writing
writing a script is an essential part of tutorial design. Tutorial writing could be considered part of the expository writing and technical writing genre
vocabulary
using? specific vocabulary related to the content explained
storyboarding
?Storyboards are graphic organizers in the form of illustrations or images displayed in sequence for the purpose of pre-visualizing?~ Wikipedia
digital storytelling
a tutorial is a special type of story. It requires the ?teller? of the story to engage the ?listener? via different digital media
networking
tutorials are meant for others to learn from us
digital media
creating, editing, and mixing of a variety of media forms (text, images, audio, video, etc.) and the fluency to work with a variety of media and switch effortless between them
empathy
the ability to understand and share the feelings (ex. not know how to do something or understand) of another

In addition to supporting students in gaining competency and fluency in the above mentioned skills, we also need to emphasize QUALITY work. Too many student-created tutorials, lack depth of content knowledge and more emphasis seemed to have been placed on using a specific tool rather than showing evidence of learning.

In an effort to support teachers and have a handy list for students when creating tutorials, I created the following checklist. The checklist is divided into three parts: