Abstract:

This study presents seven types of visual modifications to customize the teaching materials for a new interdisciplinary course titled “The Role of Hydrogen Energy for Net Zero Emission and Practice”. An instructional designer from non-STEM background crosses over to assist the instructor team of Mechanical Engineering and Environmental Law to redesign their lecture slides—to ensure this general education course can appeal students from a wide variety of non-STEM majors while encouraging them to expand from their home disciplines. Seven epistemic obstacles emerge during domain integration between sub-disciplines of STEM from a non-STEM mediation. To facilitate students’ knowledge digestion and retention in an effective manner, the theories and principles from Mayer’s Multimedia Learning (2021) are adopted to visually restructuring instructors’ slide presentations. The initial version is reviewed by four non-STEM students; they individually identify their confusions slide by slide. Then based on which, the instruction designer proceeds with modifications. Data collection includes slides presentations from each instructor, and a total of six are analyzed along with the feedback from the four non-STEM reviewers. Data analysis adopted multimodal qualitative analysis to explore problematic design of the lecture slides. Additionally, the modifications made to reduce students’ extraneous processing are demonstrated.

The most frequent problems during the semester are scrutinized and complied into seven categories:
1. absence of objective,
2. incongruity among elements,
3. domination of texts,
4. disconnection between imaginary and textual representations,
5. disassociation between knowledge and personal relevance,
6. random switch between languages, and
7. Information implicitness.

Among which, the occurrences of information implicitness are four times more than the others. After the discussions with the non-STEM reviewers and the instructors, it happens often when students lack essential foundation in basic STEM disciplines, while the required knowledge is automatically overlooked by the instructors due to the “basicness”. From this viewpoint, an instructional designer becomes vital when this type of inclusive STEM course is offered. The strategies to tackle these impediments and corresponding examples will also be illustrated. Pedagogic suggestions in this study will elucidate how teaching materials can be made effectively to lower learners’ cognitive load and to prevent epistemic confrontations.

Keywords:

Non-STEM to STEM, interdisciplinary, teaching materials, instructional design.