During my tenure as an educational scriptwriter with Standard Deviants, the popular comedic educational video brand, the company pivoted away from the DVD format and “flipped the classroom”—adapting the entire Standard Deviants video collection into a full-blown online learning platform, Standard Deviants Accelerate.
In addition to the core original video content, we designed the new platform to include a full suite of ancillary learning materials and bonus video content.
Branded learning works better
Standard Deviants UX writing and instructional design
My role
Our tiny creative powerhouse of a production team created this project from scratch. As lead educational copywriter, my key contributions included:
UX and learning design - Drawing off Bloom’s taxonomy and other learning design principles, contributing key ideation to the development and design of the learner experience, including features, flow, and add-ons
Educational content writing - Creating multiple choice and critical thinking questions, project-based learning assignments, assessments, rubrics, and video scripts
Naming, UX, and brand experience - Writing every last feature name, button, notification, and product description, all reflecting the quirky Standard Deviants voice
Welcome to Standard Deviants Accelerate
Feature names expressed the zany, irreverent Standard Deviants brand, while subtitles ensured clarity of use.
The flow across features was designed to reflect learning design principles, with activities prompting increasingly higher order cognitive functioning. Before that, however, this opening section was designed to engage students and activate pre-existing knowledge.
Drop-down navigation allowed students or teachers to focus on one section at a time and to have the option of skipping around or following the prescribed order of activities.
Feature descriptions expressed the Standard Deviants brand while activity instructions remained direct and empathetic.
When students answered a question wrong on their multiple choice quizzes, they were linked to a clip of the relevant video content. Parents and teachers were grateful for this feature.
Final learning activities emphasized higher order cognitive functioning including critical thinking and project-based learning.
Developing a project-based learning activity via an online experience that also aligned with the brand required some serious creative thinking. This feature prompted students to teach something they had learned to an imagined target audience. It was very cool to see how some students ran with this.
The final feature was a reward, an odd extra bit of video. I wouldn’t want you to miss out on this.