Executive Functioning Online Course
The Goal
PINE, an award-winning inclusive education training program, was looking to develop a course about executive functioning for their innovative online learning platform.
PINE needed a follow-up course for their Introduction to Autism Course that spoke more broadly about neurodiversity.
Having developed and led executive functioning workshops for years, I collaborated with the PINE team to rethink and retool the workshop to create an online, interactive course.
Doing online learning right
Many people’s experiences with online learning involves reading some text, watching narrated videos, and answering a few multiple choice questions. But there is more to creating an engaging online experience!
I wanted to make online learning more useful… and frankly joyful. Throughout the process, I aimed to share the concept in a memorable way so it would stick, to frame the learning so it’s clear, and to make the experience engaging and practical.
You can make online learning memorable
Executive Functioning is a complex topic that has multiple sub-skills. It can be a chore to remember a technical definition and the 11 (eleven?!) associated skills with names like “Goal Directed Persistence.” So my first step was to create a catchy way to help teachers get an understanding of the concept and learn the skills.
After filling pages of my sketchbook, I ended up batching the skills into groups, developing a simple icon for each group, and putting them together a cohesive illustration. I rethought the 11 skills and created an “executive functioning arrow”—a representation of the idea of EF as the skills you use to move towards a goal.
See the sketch come to life in the video:
I then constructed the course around understanding these skills, in this new visual context. That way we could explore this important but tricky concept accessibly and memorably.
You can make online learning engaging
Narrated videos have their place in online learning, but we aimed to make this learning experience incredibly interactive, super visual, and ultimately a joyful experience for educators.
For example, we built an interactive orchestra to demonstrate in real-time how executive functioning is like a conductor arranging multiple instruments into harmony.
Watch and listen to this 30-second video:
I collaborated with the incredible instructional designers at Digitec Interactive to create a variety of visual, interactive elements to explore the concept executive functioning, and for participants to assess their own learning and to gauge their students’ skills.
Scroll through to see some examples:
Table showing a matrix of skills such as "How many steps in a direction can they remember and follow?" and levels from "Low end" to "Mid range" to "High end"
Animated GIF of a 4-by-2 grid of cards with vocabulary terms on them. Animation shows the cards being clicked and a green or red answer appearing underneath.
Animated GIF of a bar graph of executive functioning skills, with the word "TEACHER" at the top. Animation shows the bar graphs growing for each skill that is clicked on.
You can make online learning practical
Important new perspectives only land if there is an actionable take-away. We used clear case examples and stories and offered an array of strategy templates for educators to walk away thinking, “I can do that.”
The classic web graphic organizer we provide in the course is tweaked to use color and shape to identify categories and levels of detail.
Here, the topic, animals, is in a black bubble, and the categories and examples of animals are in color-coded ovals and rectangles. This can help students’ organization skills when learning new content, and preparing for writing.
From Storyboard to Online Course
Collaborating with PINE Program team and the instructional designers at Digitec Interactive, the course was mapped out on a storyboard and went through multiple iterative rounds to provide the script and story and feel of what the online course would become.
Scroll through the storyboard to see how the ideas were laid out for the “Prime” strategy module.
Then check out the video below—
From idea…
…to reality
Check out a screen recording of the same section of the course that the storyboard outlined.
Video of screen recording demonstrating the PINE Executive Functioning course
An award-winning online learning experience
PINE received the 2022 Gold Award for Technology Excellence at the Brandon Hall Awards in the area of “Future of Work Awards” for “Best Advance in Diversity and Inclusion Innovation!”
The innovative team at the PINE Program are advancing inclusive education across the country, with a strengths-based approach that centers perspectives of neurodivergent and disabled self-advocates. Learn more about PINE (www.pineprogram.org).
And the talented instructional designers at Digitec Interactive are some of the most creative, can-do designers I’ve worked with. Learn more about Digitec Interactive (www.digitecinteractive.com).
Collaborating with these teams allowed for the creation of a next-generation engaging, memorable, and practical learning experience for teachers—to help them meet the needs of all learners in their inclusive classrooms.
Looking for a taste of EF strategies?
Get a copy of the graphic organizer shared in the Executive Functioning course
This “web” graphic organizer uses color and shape to identify categories and levels of detail.
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