Guru Honorable Mention: Core Messages by Monarch Media
This post by Articulate Community Manager Jeanette Brooks features one of the Honorable Mentions from the 2010 Articulate Guru Awards. To see other award-winning courses from the Guru Awards, check out the posts here.
Can you build a rapid e-learning course that tackles a sensitive subject, models critical skills through relevant and impactful video examples, and takes less than four minutes for learners to complete?
Monarch Media can! Check out the Core Messages course below. It was submitted by Claire Schneeberger, Monarch Media’s founder and CEO. The course, which won an Honorable Mention in the Articulate Guru Awards, is designed for high school health teachers who are preparing to teach students how to prevent pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases.
What did the judges like about this course? The judges loved the visual appeal of a simple and inviting whiteboard metaphor, combined with organic-looking hand-drawn graphics and a handwriting font. On many slides, PowerPoint hyperlinks allow learners to navigate freely by clicking on icons in the upper-right of the whiteboard.
Judges also appreciated the tasteful simplicity of the slides — none are text-heavy, and wherever animations appear, they’re timed perfectly with the narration and they help to support the content.
Another notable element is the visual consistency. Both the Quizmaker quiz and the PDF attachment match the course’s clean, eye-pleasing visual design. Judges also liked the creative use of a multiple-response question in the quiz to simulate several questions on one quiz slide.
Want to learn a little more about Monarch’s approach in building the course? Here’s a screencast from CTO Nandu Madimchetty:
View this screencast at Screenr
Kudos to Claire and the rest of the folks at Monarch Media for winning an Honorable Mention in the Articulate Guru Awards!
More inspiring Honorable Mentions are yet to come, so stay tuned!
5 responses to “Guru Honorable Mention: Core Messages by Monarch Media”
I love the simplicity of the design and quality of the production. It’s hard to make it look easy like this. Great job!
I absolutely LOVE the use of the FAQ interaction as a tool for “Overcoming Challenges”, very clever, so simple, and it works VERY well.
Great job – loved it 🙂
Bruce
Wow. Great work Claire and Monarch. I love the clean and simplistic design. I agree with Heather, it’s hard to make it look soooo simple, clean and impactful! Kudos!
I also really liked the simple look, and especially liked embedding the videos of the researcher and the teacher examples. The teacher examples really bring home the learning. For me as a government course designer, the only drawback was that I couldn’t find any notes (closed captioning) for the video — making those portions not fully 508 compliant. How to design effective courses that are also fully compliant is a real challenge at least to me.
Really effective way to get your message across. I loved the clean and simple delivery.
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