Griffith University Reduces Lab Equipment Breakages By 90% With Articulate

The Challenge

Griffith University needed an engaging e-learning solution to create interactive courses

E-learning has long been an important strategy for Griffith University’s School of Pharmacy and Medical Sciences. The school prioritizes investment in cutting-edge teaching and learning experiences, and e-learning has played an integral role.

Dr. Barbara Hadley, a biochemistry lecturer, also finds that the school’s focus on pharmaceutical and medical content is well-suited for e-learning.

“Interactive e-learning content lends itself particularly well for pharmacy and medical sciences, where the stakes are incredibly high,” says Hadley. “With prescription errors, mistakes can be deadly. Often you don’t have a chance to correct errors. Students need ways to practice their skills in a low-risk environment, and interactive e-learning provides that opportunity.”

Originally, the university used an e-learning platform called Smart Sparrow to create and distribute content. But when the platform changed hands, they had just eight months to find a new provider. 

They knew they needed an e-learning solution that would allow them to create beautifully designed, interactive courses that would build students’ critical thinking skills. It was also crucial that the platform included analytic and feedback capabilities so course administrators could refine and improve content over time.

The Answer

With Articulate, the school creates captivating e-learning courses that build real-world skills and reduce lab errors

After exploring a variety of e-learning solutions, the school chose Articulate for its beautiful, intuitive course design and interactivity capabilities. Today, Hadley—who manages many of the Articulate courses at the school—creates Storyline and Rise content for a wide range of topics including biochemistry, chemistry, neurobiology, and pharmacy.

Often, Hadley releases Articulate lessons as lab pre-work. This approach allows students to get more value out of lab time, mitigate confusion, and prepare ahead with key context and skills. One such course, which used gamification to educate students on how to properly handle lab equipment, reduced lab equipment breakages by 90 percent. 

“Before the pre-lab courses with Articulate, the most common question students would ask would be ‘What do I do now?’,” says Hadley. “Now, they say things like, ‘I don’t think my data is trending the way that it should based on what I learned in the Articulate course.’” This, she feels, is a pivotal shift, and has prepared students for labs in new and exciting ways. 

Learner feedback is crucial for Hadley, who embeds Microsoft Forms in her courses to gather input from students on what they liked and didn’t like about a course, and any errors they found. At the end of the year, she makes changes to courses based on this feedback so each year’s version reflects any changes in student preferences, as well as the overall industry. 

“A common theme in the reviews is that the students absolutely love the Articulate modules,” says Hadley.

Unlocking Human Potential

With their courses, Griffith University cultivates deep critical thinking skills that prepare students for their next steps

Griffith’s e-learning courses don’t just prepare students to pass an exam or succeed in a lab. By fostering an academic culture of curiosity, trust, and experimentation, the university helps students build critical thinking skills while making learning fun. 

“I put lots of Easter eggs in courses—animations, gifs, jokes, fun little things,” says Hadley. “Now, my students click on everything to see if there’s a hidden interaction. They’re curious, and constantly experimenting even when they interact with the online content.” 

“Now, instead of just going skip, skip, skip, the students go, ‘What if?’”

For Hadley, clear course navigation is also crucial to establishing trust and building a learning culture of experimentation. “I never want students to get stuck,” she says. “I want them to trust that if they can’t come up with the right answer, they’ll be able to find it themselves in the course.” She methodically reviews branching scenario interactions to ensure that students always have the option to go back to keep learning uninterrupted.

In one Storyline course on how to graph a line, Hadley created a massive graph with dozens of hotspots. Students could create lines between the hotspots and click boxes to check their answers. Select the wrong answer, and they’d be taken to a video of Hadley walking them through the process in detail so they could try again with more context.

“Articulate has been the driving force behind building trust in the lessons,” says Hadley. “It allows us to create very interactive and intuitive courses. It provides the scaffold that enables us to build students’ critical thinking skills.”

Griffith University creates captivating Articulate courses that equip the next generation of pharmacy and medical science professionals with deep knowledge and skills to improve the well-being of people in their communities.