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Creating Online Learning Products for Discovery Education

Discovery Education is the worldwide leader in multimedia-based learning, serving 1.5 million teachers, and 35 million students each year. Due in part to recent legislation, it faces the challenge of crafting electronic learning tools that help teachers engage their students and accomplish more in each class. Discovery Education turned to NavigationArts to develop two such tools, Discovery Education Science Connection (DESC) and Discovery Education Health Connection (DEHC), two online learning modules intended for use in middle school classrooms.

Following our Web development process, we created a set of increasingly detailed deliverables that defined each module's user experience and content requirements This enabled us to build consensus among project stakeholders at each key decision point in the project. Among the most important characteristics of the modules was engagement; we felt it was important to leverage the functionality of rich internet applications (RIAs) to immerse students as they interacted with a wealth of information.

Project elements and results included:

• Developed a functional prototype and conducted usability testing with middle school science teachers to identify usability issues
• Revised and further refined the user interface based on usability testing results
• Designed a toolset for managing pre-defined and custom assessment content
• Incorporated rich JavaScript UI effects to make the learning experience more engaging
• Created a lightweight and flexible user interface to serve as the template for future Discovery Education online learning products