ThingLink Spotlight! Lighting Up Immersive Learning with Jessica Henderson
ThingLink Luminaries is a series of guest blog posts highlighting certified trainers who are creating interactive and immersive experiences to make learning more engaging, accessible, and meaningful. Our educators and learning designers bring a thoughtful approach to immersive learning, and their work reflects a deep commitment to creativity, pedagogy, and innovation.
In each profile post, we’ll explore their background, teaching philosophy, and favorite ThingLink projects—offering insight into how they’re making a lasting impact in their classrooms, organizations and communities! Enjoy!
Would you like to become a ThingLink Certified Trainer?
If you’d like to learn more about the benefits of being part of our global ThingLink Certified Trainer community, check our page!
Introducing Jessica
I am a Senior Instructional Designer for the Office of Distance Education and Learning Design at The Ohio State University. As an Instructional Designer I have supported a wide array of Higher Ed courses, including World Languages, Film Studies, Literature, Mathematics, and Teaching and Learning courses. I have over a decade of experience in foreign language teaching and curriculum development. Incorporating joy, play, and evidence-based User Experience (UX) strategies into the learning experience is at the height of my design practice, whether it be experimenting with immersive Digital Education Escape Rooms, virtual tours, Scenario-Based Learning practices, interactive storytelling, or visual layouts. My goal as an Instructional Designer is to create positive learning experiences for all.
Jessica’s Ingenious ThingLink Project
This project was an experiment to help us rethink the delivery of weekly modules within a Learning Management System (Canvas in our case). The project was for an English Literature course that was all about Arthurian Legends.
Each week students were asked to complete a quest that contained a series of adventures (watching a short instructor-led video, conducting a literary analysis, completing low-stakes assignments, etc.). Rather than presenting each week and quest through the standard LMS Module format, we wanted to maintain the weekly consistent structure of course Modules but gamify the course a bit in order to bring those modules and weeks to life by relating them to the content of Arthur and his world of Camelot. So we used ThingLink to create a course map that navigated through different spaces within Arthurian Legends during different weeks of the semester. The tags included in the map then directed students directly to their digital quest workbook/portfolio pages for that week. This map lived on the course’s homepage within the LMS alongside an additional ThingLink media scene that served as a course roster where each student was asked to create their own personal shield and motto and display it on the Quest Fellowship wall (an interactive ThingLink image with shield icons and labels of student names that opened to text and media tags where their shields and mottos lived).
What Inspired You To Create This Project?
My primary inspiration is the continuous research I have done around cognitive theories in learning, Universal Design for Learning principles, and gameful learning approaches. With fantastical content like Arthurian Legends and the concept of quests we had an opportunity to really enhance the authenticity of the course assignments and materials, helping students make more explicit connections between ideas and skills and really maximizing motivational strategies.
What Were The Highlights and Were There Any Spin-Offs?
As mentioned, the project was used as the primary access point for the course’s materials and assignments throughout an entire semester. A label was added to the map and moved/connected to the specific quest number for a given week so students could always track their progress and where they were in the term.
This map also served as a starting point for an additional project I helped brainstorm around a full blow Choose Your Own Adventure style course where we are experimenting with using ThingLink rather than linear LMS modules to create customized learning pathways for students where everything can be quickly and easily accessed through connect ThingLink scenes and scenarios, and again bringing the content to life through the immersive background images that frame the content.
Do You Have Any Other Projects in The Pipe-Line?
A year or two ago I was working on a French language course and a lesson that introduces the future verb tense. To present this new grammar form I had the idea of mimicking some sort of fortune telling game, like the shaking of a Magic 8 ball. I used a combination of short video media scenes, branching questions, and text blocks within the scenario builder to introduce the forms within meaningful phrases:
What Do You Love About ThingLink?
For me ThingLink has been a spark for creativity and imagination. The flexibility and extensive capabilities of ThingLink have really enabled me to think outside the box of what distance learning can and will look like in the future. It has also maximized my problem-solving skills! Whenever I have an idea I immediately turn to ThingLink because I know that there is a way to accomplish my goals in one form or another and I can do so in a way that considers accessibility, inclusion, and privacy and security concerns that are of great importance to my work and that of the university.
Fun Fact and Connect with Jessica
I speak Italian and have several close relatives in Italy, and have studied both Spanish and French (though my reading skills are far superior to my speaking skills). And I love to sing, play piano, and draw!
👉 You can connect with Jessica via LinkedIn
