I worked with a friend to generate a free instructor-led, asynchronous mindfulness challenge for teenagers. With the heavy load often carried by teens during the high school years, this course felt especially relevant.
Course Goals & Objectives
Although our learners were familiar with the benefits of mindfulness and excited about the challenge, they had no formal mindfulness training prior to this experince. As a result, we pulled from foundational mindfulness and meditation concepts to populate the curriculum with microlearning lessons, daily meditations, and weekly reflective exercises.
Assessment
When it came to mindfulness, our research revealed that completion, consistency, and reflection were the biggest contributors to success. Unfortunationely, a free Thinkific course meant no gradebook to track our learners. We were, however, able to track lesson completion. As a result, we built our assessment around a completion-based point system that utilized Thinkific’s lesson completion tracking feature.
Essentially, each required element got its own lesson. For each completed lesson, our learners earned one point. As a learner accummulated points, they progressed through our three mindfulness levels: seeker, explorer, and master.
Pacing
Required elements you say? For us, that meant daily microlearning lessons, daily meditations, a weekly discussion board experience, and a weekly reflective journal entry.
1
Daily Microlearning Lessons
2
Daily Meditation
3
Weekly Discussion
4
Weekly Journal Entry
Click to Expand
Tools
We chose Thinkific as our LMS because it is free and functional. We also used Camtasia, Audacity, Powerpoint, and Canva in our development process.
UX/UI
Becasuse of our reliance on Thinkfic’s lesson completion feature, we needed to list each element separately. However, this separation left the course cluttered and disorganized.
Fortunately, we disovered that creating separate chapters to house supplemental items like introductions and meditation resources was the answer. It was a lucky find!
Click to Expand
Create & Curate Content
Finally! The fun part—creating and curating content. Check out the screenshots of some of our created content. Don’t forget to expand for a closer look.
-
- Intorductory Video
-
- Learning Objectives
-
- Journal Prompt
-
- Discussion Prompt
Click to Expand
Review & Reflect
No instructional process is complete without an iterative series of reflections and revisions. Our process also included several peer reviews—which was a fun and helpful bonus.
