Flagship Project - Parents' Role in Creating a Positive Football Experience

Play The Part: Supporting Your Child in Football

I designed this scenario-based eLearning concept project for parents of an Academy Football team to help promote positive behaviours during and after football training and matches.

Experience Project

OVERVIEW

Audience: Parents of a football academy team in England, UK

Responsibilities: Instructional design, eLearning development, Visual Design, Storyboarding, Action Mapping, Prototyping, Learning Management System

Tools Used: Articulate Storyline 360, Vyond, Adobe Illustrator, Adobe Photoshop, Canva

Introduction

Studies have shown that parents play an important role in a child's experience and participation in sport. Parent’s autonomy-supportive styles, moderate parental involvement, positive parent-child’s relationship, and a parent-initiated tasked climate have been identified as optimal parenting strategies [1]. Yet, coaches still encounter parents being overly involved in both the coaches’ and child’s decision-making during training sessions and matches.

This project was developed to raise awareness and educate parents on how to positively support their child’s football journey, both during and outside of coaching sessions and matches. By promoting respectful and constructive behaviour, this scenario-based eLearning aims to help parents foster a healthy sporting environment - one that prioritises personal growth, enjoyment and teamwork.

I used the A.D.D.I.E. model (see below) to guide me through the development process of the project.

Process

Investigating The Problem

A Football Academy Manager from a League 1 Team in England (UK) reached out to seek my help in addressing the escalating issue of poor parental behaviour from the development team during training sessions and matches.

Despite being given a handbook and presentation highlighting the vision, mission, values and expectations by the club during orientation at the beginning of the season, the club continues to receive reports on disciplinary cases by parents. The Academy team manager mentioned that such incidents are not unique to that specific club and had been observed in other academy teams as reported in this article [1].

To investigate more regarding this issue, I dug deeper and found an Annual Grassroots Disciplinary Review Report for 2023-24 season published by Football Association (FA) [2]. Key findings from the report include:

Overall Misconduct Charges: A total of 2, 561 charges were issued for serious misconduct allegations, marking a 13% increase from the previous season.
Discriminatory Conduct: There was a 17% rise in charges related to discrimination, highlighting ongoing concerns in this area.

Citing this growing concern and recognising the role that parents play in fostering a positive environment, the Academy team manager has decided to find more effective ways to educate parents on acceptable behaviours in a bid to tackle this nationwide issue.

Setting Measurable Goal

To reduce disciplinary cases and disruptive behaviours by 40% by the end of 2024-25 football season.

Identifying Ways to Attain The Goal

After setting a realistic and measurable goal, I helped the client to identify what the club needed to DO to achieve it. To do this, I first had to identify the root cause of parents not adhering to the club's code of conduct. I enlisted the help of Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) and relevant stakeholders to gain more insight on the matter. I conducted interviews to find out the type of unacceptable behaviours that typically arises and the club's current methods of mitigating them.

Solution

Based on my analysis, I found out that the issue stems from a lack of time in reading the club's handbook resulting in a lack of awareness in the behavioural standards set by the football club. Thus, I proposed a scenario-based eLearning module as it is less time-consuming for the parents to complete, and more effective in retaining knowledge. The aim of this scenario-based learning is to highlight the negative effects that poor parental behaviour has on a child's overall football experience and the consequences for non-compliance of the club's code of conduct.

Action Mapping

Through my discussions with the Academy team, we identified pressing behaviours to be addressed. I also reviewed the FA's Code of Respect to understand possible consequences [3] for such behaviours.

Guided by Cathy Moore's Action Mapping, I prioritised the list of behaviours and selected four that the academy manager and I deemed most important to show in my training module.

Text-based Storyboard

After selecting the top 4 behaviours to be addressed, I crafted a plan to expand on the high priority actions using story telling techniques. My goal was to guide the parents through a football season using scenarios that are typical in a football coaching session and matches.

To enhance the learning experience, I used the examples given by SMEs during the initial discussion to mimic real-world scenarios so that parents can easily relate and remember.

Visual Mockups

After completing the text-based storyboard, I proceeded to create visual mockups using Adobe Illustrator. I drew inspiration from the club's stadium to design my mood board. Since I knew I would be using Vyond to create the animations, I also browsed Vyond's media library to check if it had the illustrations I needed for my project. Noticing that Vyond had limited illustration options, I used Freepik to download additional illustrations and vectors. I then edited the downloaded images in Adobe Photoshop to ensure they aligned with the colour palette. The colour palette was chosen based on the colours of the club logo*.

*In the above project, I have replaced the logo in the video to maintain the Club's anonymity.

Next, I created wireframes for the visual mockups incorporating UI design principles. By creating the mockups first, I was able to quickly update the slides based on client's feedback, before developing the first module in the authoring software Articulate 360.

Interactive Prototype

Prior to the full development, I created an interactive prototype for the first scene using Vyond and Articulate Storyline. I used Vyond to craft the animations and backgrounds, and Articulate Storyline to incorporate the introduction, prompt screens and questions along with its consequences.

Full Development

After collecting and applying feedback from the interactive prototype, I developed the remaining scenes of the course. This was the most exciting part of the project as I got to experiment with the variables, conditions and triggers to make the learning experience more interactive. I also placed sound effects throughout the animations to make the project a full audio-visual experience.

Uploading Content on Learning Management System

This learning module was part of a larger course unit that I was tasked to do by the football club. Thus, once I have completed this project along with other learning content and gotten the approval from the client, I created a course titled "Parent Orientation: Supporting Your Young Athlete's Football Journey" and uploaded all the learning materials onto TalentLMS - the LMS used by the football club. I was also in charge of enrolling the users into the LMS.

*Due to copyrights and confidentiality reasons, I can only show the demo view of the course page.

Gathering Feedback and Tracking Performance Goal

The main aim of the module was to reduce disciplinary cases and disruptive behaviours from parents by 40% by the end of the 2024-25 football season.

At the point of writing this, the football club is still halfway through the football season and therefore, unable to provide the final statistics. Despite that, the Academy Team manager has already reported a 45% decline in disruptive behaviours as compared to the previous season.

As it is also the first time that the Club uses scenario-based learning as part of its course, I have included a survey feedback form to gather participants' experience and effectiveness of the learning module. Questions in the survey were curated to gather both quantitative and qualitative feedback from the learners. Overall, there has been an overwhelming positive response from the learners.

Areas of Improvement

As a strong advocate for data-driven learning, I’m particularly interested in how data analytics can be leveraged to enhance digital learning experiences and improve learning efficacy. For future learning modules, I plan to integrate JavaScript-based xAPI (Experience API) to track and analyse specific learner interactions. This will allow for more granular insights into user behavior, enabling continuous improvement of the learning experience through targeted adjustments based on real-time data.