From Philosophy to Practice: An Interactive Advisor Growth Experience (Adobe Express AI)
Who it's for: Academic Advisors
Where it lives: Canvas LMS
The need: Challenge: Advisors lack clear opportunities to connect advising theory and key skills to real-world situations, impacting confidence, development, and retention
The result: The retention supported by employees.
This project helps academic advisors build transferable skills by connecting theory with daily processes. The goal is to support confident and effective student interactions.
Advisors know procedures, but linking steps to core concepts is challenging. This experience bridges that gap through reflection and real-world use.
Advisors develop a stronger professional identity and gain confidence in complex advising situations.
Learning Objective
Communicate an advising philosophy and apply conceptual, informational, and relational skills in real advising situations.
DesignTools
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Adobe Express (AI-powered interactive video)
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Adobe Captivate (interactive design and development)
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ScreenFlow (video editing)
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Keynote (storyboarding and visual design)
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Canvas LMS (delivery platform)
From Theory to Practice
When I began this project, my aim wasn't to train advisors on new procedures. My goal was to help them recognize their own growth and incorporate NACADA and advisory values that were common across all universities.
Advisors complete training and learn the steps, but rarely have time to pause and reflect on how those steps relate to their professional development. This insight shaped the design.
To better understand this, I used a Hierarchical Task Analysis (HTA) to break down what advisors actually do in real interactions. What stood out was that advising is not just a sequence of steps. Each action connects to deeper thinking about how advisors interpret information, communicate clearly, and build relationships with students.
That's why I chose Merrill’s First Principles of Instruction. This model, introduced by David Merrill, focuses on learning through real-world problems, which aligns with how advisors actually learn on the job. It’s built around five key principles: task-centered learning, activation, demonstration, application, and integration. I did this in the video by activating prior knowledge in the first segment, then activating it through each pause, and finally applying it at the end when the advisor has to create their own philosophy.
My objective was to help advisors see how their thinking and approach evolve over time and to address the department's retention problem by applying this theory. I was able to make progress towards that problem
Instructional Design Blueprint
This document outlines the problem, audience, and learning goals that guided the design of this project. It helped clarify the gap between understanding advising concepts and applying them in real situations. It also shaped the experience's structure to focus on real-world application and advisor development.
Hierarchical Task Analysis
This document shows how I structured the experience, guiding advisors from reflection to real-world application. It walks through how they build and apply their advising approach step by step.
