Disphoria Design designed, developed and illustrated two large e-learning courses for One Space and Single Parent Action Network (SPAN) – an organisation which aims to empower, educate and help single parents.
The two courses were: Managing Your Self Help Group, and Grow Your Group, both aimed at supporting community or peer groups, with useful information about funding applications, group dynamics and strategy.
The courses had been run successfully as paper-based postal courses, but this was an inefficient and expensive method of course delivery, so we were given the brief of finding the best method of delivering them as online e-learning courses.
We chose to use Moodle as the platform to deliver the courses. Moodle is an open source application, or Virtual Learning Enviroment (VLE), 
designed to enable teachers to update the pages and structure of their own courses, with lots of features designed to create a sense of a learning group, such as forums, live chat, peer assessment of submitted work, 
online grading, with private, tutor group and public levels of access. Each learner can create a profile and interact with the tutor and their tutor group or class through the VLE. The scores for quizzes and written work can be saved, and the tutor can give feedback through the application so the learner can gauge
their progress through the courses.
The primary consideration in the design was the target group, who might feel intimidated or excluded by unfamiliar technology – so the user-interface had to be as obvious and clear as possible, and the overall style of the course was bright, clean and reflected the branding of Single Parent Action Network and One Space.
To make the course appear as welcoming and entertaining as possible we adopted a very loose energetic cartoon illustration style in contrast to the straight lines of the overall theme, and to balance out the weighty text.It was important to humanize the experience of studying online, so learners felt happy to be using the course.
Teaching and tailored help-sheets were provided, so the tutors and managers had learned to edit and use the courses by the time they were completed. We worked very closely with the organisation to ensure the quality and usefulness of the e-learning experience.
These were both large courses with many illustrations. Below are a selection of the illustrations as examples.
