LTGR Ep. #71 – “What’s Hot in Instructional Design?”
This is a special episode in which Susan asks listeners to help her with some research. As part of a conference session, Susan wants to address “what’s hot in instructional design”. However, she wants to use social networking to collect ideas. Listen to her explain to Dan what she’s up to and then respond to her on Twitter at smanning2 using hashtag #freshIDtrends
Listeners, share your thoughts! Continue the discussion by posting to Twitter (using hashtag #freshIDtrends), at ltgreenroom.org or talk to us in LearningTimes! We facilitate discussion in LearningTimes.org or call us at 1-800-609-9006 x8055 (US and Canada) or 678-255-2174 x8055 (outside US and Canada).
January 24th, 2010 at 2:56 am
I haven’t taught online for 18 months yet, I have only taught one asynchronous online course one semester. But nonetheless I have collected good student feedback and will use that to make revisions. Hopefully these revisions will make this semester’s learning experience a better one for the upcoming cycle of students.
My first task is conducting an error analysis for each assessment, which is to compare the student responses or products with the goals set for each of the lessons. It may be that the goals are great but the activities I asked them to do in order for them to achieve them are completely unrelated. The adjustments may be as simple as rewriting the instructions or as extensive as changing out the activity altogether. It also involves looking at the course map and determining if the particular lesson’s location in the sequence of course goals make sense. I’ll look at each activity and see why they were successful or why they failed. One likely cause of overall weak student performance is that the students did not yet have the sufficient background knowledge to respond as informed learners. The readings and other content material presented up until that point will help me determine if this is the case.
The second task I want to do is look at the discussion board. This semester I’ve selected that component of the course to do a deep analysis of why some topics resulted in far richer student discourse than others. I’ll look at research available on the importance of the DB. I’ll also compare suggested best practices and decide if the suggestions are relevant to my goal of using the discussion board as a central feature of the course.
I hope to make that part of this asynchronous course rock. Do I look at how active the students were on each of the topics? Is the length of the postings something to consider? Is “lurking”ok? I think it is, but am I wrong? Should prompts be rewritten in ways that stimulate students to enter into a debate? Brainstorming is part of the revision process as well.
I’ve got until March. That’s a lot of work to do in 5 weeks.