Discover how a cross-functional team used intentional workflows and collaborative design to create immersive, scenario-based learning for online early childhood education. This session offers practical tools—like Creative Briefs and project board templates—and scalable strategies for instructional designers and faculty building media-rich courses, even with limited resources.

As online learning continues to expand, institutions are increasingly expected to deliver media-rich, professionally relevant course experiences—even in disciplines that rely heavily on fieldwork and hands-on learning. But creating these kinds of experiences requires more than just instructional content—it takes intentional collaboration across roles, clear communication, and sustainable design workflows. This session offers a practical, behind-the-scenes look at how one cross-functional team—comprised of a faculty subject matter expert, instructional designers, graphic designers, interactive activities specialists, and video production specialists—worked together to design immersive, scenario-based learning for pre-service teachers in an online early childhood education program.  

This session will detail our collaborative design process, the communication strategies that made it successful, and the workflows that allowed us to deliver high-impact, pedagogically sound, and technically polished learning experiences. Attendees will learn how we used a Creative Brief template to guide early conversations around learning goals and media needs, helping faculty articulate their goals clearly to multimedia specialists. We’ll also walk through our ADDIE-aligned Asana project board, designed to facilitate collaboration among instructional designers, graphic designers, and video specialists. 

As we unpack this collaborative process, we will also share examples of the finished products that we developed for an Interdisciplinary Early Childhood Program. These examples include: 

• A 360° Virtual Preschool Classroom: An activity built in Articulate Storyline, allowing online students to tour a model preschool classroom and reflect on spatial design elements that facilitate children's learning 

• Instructional Indicators Rise Activity: A video-based teaching reflection activity built in Articulate Rise, in which students are tasked with identifying appropriate teaching behaviors in example videos 

• “A Day in the Life of a Kindergarten Teacher” Video Series: A dramatized production staged in our media studio, guiding students through common real-world challenges faced by new kindergarten teachers 

For each of these examples, we will focus on how we leveraged interdisciplinary team collaboration to create an effective product and discuss challenges, setbacks, and lessons learned in our collaborative process. We will also share student feedback on these tools’ impact on learner engagement and preparedness, offering evidence of how strong collaboration leads to stronger student outcomes. 

While these examples showcase the potential of a well-resourced media team, we’ll also discuss scaled-down alternatives and modified workflows for teams working under tighter budgetary or resource constraints. Additionally, we plan to address challenges that we faced during development, including budget, scalability across courses, adaptability to future changes in program curriculum, and team member capacity—issues that will have universal resonance for all audience members, no matter the size of their team.  

This session speaks directly to the OLC 2025 theme—The Next 30 Years: Vision, Inspiration, and Transformation—by demonstrating how sustainable design processes and cross-role partnerships can transform how institutions deliver engaging, professional preparation online. Whether you're a team of ten or a team of one, you'll leave with practical strategies and adaptable tools to enhance your own course design collaborations. 

Interactivity Plan 

This session will be interactive and reflective. Attendees will engage with short media examples, consider how similar goals could be achieved in their own contexts, and share the challenges they face when coordinating cross-role collaboration. 

Media Showcase + Structured Reflection 

We will present short excerpts from the interactive resources our team developed—such as the 360° Virtual Preschool Classroom, Articulate Rise activities, and the “Day in the Life” video series. After demonstrating some examples from each, we will prompt the audience to reflect on how they might achieve a similar learning goal with the tools or collaborators available at their respective institutions. 

Attendees will be able to either respond in person or via an on-screen Slido poll, with a few responses shared aloud to spark ideas across varying resource levels. In this discussion, we hope to open the conversation to discuss ways that faculty and instructional designers operating without the assistance of media specialists or under budgetary or time constraints can also achieve similar results using lower-cost tools, modified production processes, or by repurposing Open Educational Resources (as we did in the case of the Instructional Indicators Rise Activity).  

Peer Exchange and Q&A 

At the end of our presentation, we will conclude with a brief facilitated discussion where attendees are invited to share either: 

• One challenge they face in developing media-rich learning experiences for online courses, or 

• One tool or strategy they’re considering adapting from our presentation 

This exchange will be structured via a prompt on screen and will flow into Q&A. 

Takeaway Resource Packet 

Finally, all attendees will receive a link to a digital resource packet that includes: 

• A sample of our team's Creative Brief templates 

• A sample of our team’s ADDIE-aligned Asana template