How to communicate with children

Overview

This online course aims to provide target audiences with the tools, skills, languages, and strategies to help communicate with children effectively. Especially it helps the parents, caregivers and teachers to communicate in a better way to be caring, responsible, and respectful so that children can model them after. With hopes that the children can grow self-reliant, cooperative, and connected in addition to bringing what they've learned to their daily lives to build effective communication with friends, families, colleagues, and the next generation. 

Design and Learning Philosophy

Online courses tend to be packed with content and least engaging, therefore they are less impactful in many ways. In order to build the most fun and meaningful learning experiences, the course design should be focusing on the learners and the topics that interest them. Thus a focus group assessment should be conducted before developing a course. The assessment will help to answer questions like suitable contents, teaching methods, activities, etc. In addition to that, when designing the activities, the activities need to be practical, and learners can relate to, learn from and apply it back to any real-life situations. More importantly, activities should be built upon previous concepts and knowledge blocks. 

I also believe that the course interface must be organized in a user-friendly manner. Information and course materials should be easy to locate, and instructions should be clear and concise, and well-communicated with learners. 

There are many methods of online learning now. Many tools are widely available so my goal is to utilize some of these tools and develop methods to fully take advantage of these tools that hopefully will benefit learners in this journey.  

Problem and Solution 

One of the problems that parents experienced very often is that they struggle to get their children to cooperate and listen. Each year, parents and caregivers ask teachers for suggestions, ideas, or solutions on how to get their children to do as they are told, stop whining, and how they can get their children to control their emotions. They also ask for explanations as to why their children are behaving in such ways. Based on many years of my teaching experience, I concluded some main problems and tools that can help to solve those problems. An eLearning course is chosen to teach the parents and caregivers how to communicate with their children more successfully. The course will use different activities and storylines that simulate real-life situations in which parents and caregivers might encounter in their households. 

Design and Development Process

A client wanted a course to teach parents how to communicate with their children. Through analysis and research, the parents and caregivers demonstrated a lack of understanding, tools, language, and strategies to communicate with children proactively. Therefore, we designed and developed an interactive course where parents could learn and practice the skills and tools in a psychologically safe place before they apply the skills back to their children.

While developing the course, we came across a few questions:

• What are the best media for the course? 

• The duration of the course?

• What's the most common problem all parents face?

• Which assessments do not take up much of the parents' and instructors' time?

I used the Design Thinking Process Guide from the Institute of Design at Stanford as a guide. To fully understand our target audiences' needs and answer our questions, we first need to empathize with them. Therefore, we conducted a small focus group study with 4-6 parents. This is what we found out:

• No scholarly articles or lengthy readings.

• A course mostly about practical applications and putting them into action.

• A safe community where they can discuss their problems and get support from each other.

• Interested in the online course but doesn't want it to be boring and feels like corporate training they have in work.

• Interested in attending in-person sessions to get to know their community in person but don't want to commit to a month or above course where they must sacrifice their weekends with their families.  

• Time they are willing to spend on the course is less than 30 minutes a day.

• The common problems the parents have in their households. 

• Activities and assessments best relate to their daily lives and could be finished within 30 minutes. 

After all the information gathered, I outlined the parents' pain points, and a mix of in-person sessions and online self-paced asynchronous courses would be the best way to provide this learning experience, given the limited time they have from their busy lives at work and home. 

To start first, I analyzed the problems the parents encountered in their households. Then I grouped them into four categories, which now become the four online modules with different units about each tool they will learn on communication with children. With the course structure in place, I started my creative process using the Backward Design Model to design the assessment and activities for the course. The challenge with the assessment is to match the learner's needs. It needs to be practical and related to their daily lives in addition to under thirty minutes. 

On the other hand, the instructors don't want to spend extra time from their work to grade and mark the assignments. With all the criteria, I devised a Journal Book where learners must record one of their weekly problems before learning the tools. Then after the online session, they analyze and solve their problem with the prompts from the Journal Book and the tools they've learned. So in the last in-person session, their problems will be discussed, shared, and role-played. Meeting almost all the requirements of both learners and instructors. Moreover, the learners can see the changes in their mindset and skill in communicating with their children. 

Another challenge was the activities in the course. After plenty of research, Articulate Storyline is the only best tool to create the course I envisioned. However, I did not want the only activity throughout the course to be interactive stories, and I wanted more variety of activities. I returned to Fink's taxonomy and checked my missing components for significant learning. That's when I found out I was missing the caring and human dimension part. I gave the parents the tools, skills, language, and strategies but missed a critical part. The parents didn't understand why their children reacted or behaved in such a way. They won't be able to apply the tools in the correct situations if the parents can't understand their children's feelings and show them that their parents care for them. Therefore, in the course, there are activities asking learners to identify the children's feelings, experience the child's feelings themselves, and show the learners how they feel in addition to practical scenarios for them to practice talking to children. 

After drafting activities and the storyline, I built the course structure on Canvas and used Articulate Storyline for the content. It was my first time using Articulate Storyline; therefore, the learning curve was steep, especially with the activities and assessments. The variables, calculating the scores, percentages, and different situations took me quite a while to figure out, even with video teaching, as there wasn't a video that matched what I needed for the activity. But I was proud once I figured it out and saw the outcome.