PSL201Y — Week 1 Case and Help Sessions

A Week 1 case and help session for a second-year university physiology course, rebuilt from the course director’s existing lecture deck into a session students work through rather than watch. Fifteen stages run across five parts and take about ninety-five minutes. Twelve of them ask the student to commit to an answer before any explanation opens. The session ends in a summary sheet the student can print and keep, and the same page carries a facilitator view with teaching notes and a presentation view for the lecture theatre.

The material already existed and was strong, but it was a slide deck. In that form a case is narrated: the lecturer poses a question, waits a moment, and supplies the answer, and the room follows along agreeing. Students leave believing they could have reached the same conclusion, and then cannot do it on an exam. The requirement was to convert a session that was delivered *to* students into one that cannot proceed until each student has committed to a position of their own.

Second-year undergraduates meeting physiological reasoning for the first time, working either in a help session or alone afterwards — and the instructor running it, who needs the same artefact to work on a projector and to carry notes only they can see.

• Instructional design — converting a lecture deck into a staged session with a defined reasoning method
• Learning design — the commit-then-reveal structure, the stage gating, and what each stage is allowed to assume
• Content design — rewriting the cases so each one turns on a decision rather than a recall
• Interaction and visual design — the interface, the data displays and the three viewing modes
• Accessibility — every chart readable as a table, every state carrying a word as well as a colour

What the design set out to achieve. These are objectives, not results.

• Make the student state a position before the explanation is available to them
• Keep the subject expert’s content and sequence intact — this was a change of form, not of substance
• Give the instructor one artefact for the projector, the help session and the student working alone
• Let a student stop partway through and come back without losing their reasoning
• End on something the student keeps, rather than on a completion message

One page holds the whole session. Stages unlock in order, so a student cannot read ahead to the explanation before committing — the gating is the pedagogy, not a restriction. Progress is held in the student’s own browser: nothing is submitted, nothing is scored, and nothing is reported to the course. The same page switches between a student view, a presentation view sized for a lecture theatre, and a facilitator view that adds teaching notes without a second document to keep in step.

Drafting and iteration speed. The reasoning structure, the decision about what each stage may assume, and every judgement about what a second-year student can be expected to work out unaided were mine, made against the course director’s material.

The subject expertise was the client’s and the content was already correct — my judgement was about form. Which moments are genuinely decision points and which only look like them; where a student will guess rather than reason and how to close that off; how long ninety-five minutes actually is when every stage asks for a commitment. The hardest call was restraint: a case that has been made interactive everywhere stops being a case and becomes a quiz.

Converting a narrated case without losing the narration. A lecturer builds tension across a case — here is a result, here is a second result that contradicts it, now what? That tension is easy to destroy by fragmenting the material into exercises. The structure had to preserve the arc while making the student the one who resolves it.

Two earlier builds treated the case and the underlying principle as separate pages. Both failed the same way: students met the principle with no reason to care about it, then met the case with the principle already forgotten. The published version interleaves them — the principle arrives at the moment the case requires it.

This is the clearest evidence I have that the design method transfers. The subject is undergraduate physiology, not primary curriculum; the content came from someone else’s expertise; and the same structure held — commit first, open the reasoning second, end on something the learner keeps. It also settled a question for me about working with subject experts: the most useful thing I contributed was not content, it was the decision about where a learner is made to think.

• Instructional design for post-secondary
• Case-based and problem-based learning
• Working from a subject expert’s material
• Interaction design
• Data display and interpretation
• Accessible interface design