"Instructional Design Essentials" Week 3

*Note: Though published, this post is still a work in progress!* 

BLOG POST (Due by October 5): 

Watch the videos and complete the required readings (we don't mind if you skim). Think about how each theory interacts with your instructional activity for your final project and address the following two points in your blog:

1.       In your blog, discuss which theory/ies might be most applicable to your instruction and outline a specific activity/assignment/exercise that would facilitate learning according to that theory. Outline, design, or wireframe that activity in a way that  makes sense to you so you will be able to design it more in depth when you have time. Post all of this in your blog.
PowerPoint works great for developing wireframes; use anything that is quick and easy and don't try to make it pretty!

2.       Write a brief post addressing how you are going to motivate your learners/students, and align your response with the information drawn from Small's article on motivation.
For this class, we expect that the majority of you are intrinsically motivated to complete this course. Your enrollment was of course optional, and you are likely doing this for reasons that are important to you. We've added in a few extrinsic motivators as well (e.g. blog posts viewable by your coursemates, a certificate of completion).

"Instructional Design Essentials" Week 2 (Part 2)

*Note: Though published, this post is still a work in progress!* 

BLOG POSTS (Due September 28): Second post: What kinds of teaching methods and content could best help your learners get to the goals and outcomes you set out to achieve? Continue reading Fink, pages 16-25. Start brainstorming how you could link activities and resources to your goals and assessments by answering the questions on pages 21-22, as well as using the worksheet on page 23. You don't have to have all the answers, this is just to get you started on thinking about the next phase in the design process. The Carnegie Melon reading should also be helpful in your brainstorming.

Fink, pp.21-22

Step 5.  Integration  

In this INITIAL DESIGN PHASE (Steps 1-4), you have created strong primary components for the design of your course. In order to complete this initial phase, you need to check how well these four components are aligned. 

  

1.  Situational Factors

·         Assuming you have done a careful, thorough job of reviewing the situational factors, how well are these factors reflected in the decisions you made about learning goals, feedback and assessment, learning activities?

·         What potential conflicts can you identify that may cause problems?
Time is going to be a major concern for any of my First Year Seminar instruction sessions. 

·         Are there any disconnects between your beliefs and values, the student characteristics, the specific or general context, or the nature of the subject in relation to the way you propose to run the course?  

2.  Learning Goals and Feedback & Assessment         

·         How well do your assessment procedures address the full range of learning goals?    

·         Is the feedback giving students information about all the learning goals?    

·         Do the learning goals include helping the students learn how to assess their own performance?  

3.  Learning Goals and Teaching/Learning Activities

·         Do the learning activities effectively support all your learning goals?    

·         Are there extraneous activities that do not serve any major learning goal?  

4.  Teaching/Learning Activities and Feedback & Assessment    

·         How well does the feedback loop work to prepare students for understanding the criteria and standards that will be used to assess their performance?    

·         How well do the practice learning activities and the associated feedback opportunities prepare students for the eventual assessment activities?  

A good tool for checking on integration, especially on Steps #2-4 above, is to use Worksheet 1 below. First, fill in a list of your learning goals for the course.  If possible, have one for each kind of significant learning in the taxonomy.  Second, for each major learning goal, identify how you would know whether students have achieved that kind of learning, i.e., what kind of feedback and assessment can you use? Third, again, for each major learning goal, identify what students will have to do to achieve that kind of learning.  You will often find that the assessment and the learning activity are the same or very similar. But working through this exercise can be very valuable by ensuring that you in fact have specific kinds of assessment and learning activities for each of your learning goals and that you don’t just give “lip service” to them. After you finish your final check (below), then you can start the process of assembling these several activities into a coherent whole (Phase II, starting on p. 28). 

Worksheet 1: Worksheet for Designing a Course
Learning Goals for Course:

1. 

·         Ways of Assessing This Kind of Learning:  

·         Actual Teaching-Learning Activities:

·         Helpful Resources (e.g., people, things):

2. 

·         Ways of Assessing This Kind of Learning:  

·         Actual Teaching-Learning Activities:

·         Helpful Resources (e.g., people, things):

3. 

·         Ways of Assessing This Kind of Learning:  

·         Actual Teaching-Learning Activities:

·         Helpful Resources (e.g., people, things):

4.

·         Ways of Assessing This Kind of Learning:  

·         Actual Teaching-Learning Activities:

·         Helpful Resources (e.g., people, things):

5.

·         Ways of Assessing This Kind of Learning:  

·         Actual Teaching-Learning Activities:

·         Helpful Resources (e.g., people, things):

6.

·         Ways of Assessing This Kind of Learning:  

·         Actual Teaching-Learning Activities:

·         Helpful Resources (e.g., people, things):

"Instructional Design Essentials" Week 2 (Part 1)

Well, I have fallen a bit behind in this course. Time to catch up a bit!

BLOG POSTS (Due September 28): 
First post: Here you will begin to think about assessment and tying it in to your learning outcomes. You have already thought about and written what your goals and outcomes may be, as well as considered a needs assessment for your learners. Here, you will start to plan how to provide effective feedback to your students. Read pages 13-14 of Fink's Guide and post your answers to the questions on page 15 in your blog.

Procedures for Educative Assessment
1. Forward-Looking Assessment
Formulate one or two ideas for forward-looking assessment.  Identify a situation in which students are likely to use what they have learned, and try to replicate that situation with a question, problem, or issue.

My students will be expected to find high-quality, reliable resources throughout their time in college. A possible situation could be, "You are writing a paper on x for y class - identify 2-3 discipline-specific databases to use while working on your literature review."

My students will also need to evaluate sources of information throughout their life. A possible situation could be, "You are planning to purchase your first home and need to learn more about credit scores and mortgage rates. Find three sources on this topic and evaluate them for accuracy, authority, timeliness, etc."    

2. Criteria & Standards
Select one of your main learning goals, and identify at least two criteria that would distinguish exceptional achievement from poor performance.  Then write two or three levels of standards for each of these criteria.

Criteria: “What are the general traits or characteristics of high quality work in this area?”
Standards: "How good does the work have to be, to be acceptably good or exceptionally good?"

For my main application goal from Week 1 (having students develop their critical thinking skills and evaluate their resources), I could plan a brief bibliography assignment. Criteria for the sources in the bibliography would involve whether the bibliography contained 1) peer-reviewed sources and 2) appropriately recent sources. Standards might be based on the number of sources that fit these criteria. For example, including 0 sources that are peer-reviewed would be "unacceptable," 1-2 sources would be "adequate," 3-5 sources would be "good," and 6-10 sources would be "excellent."
   
3. Self-Assessment
What opportunities can you create for students to engage in self-assessment of their performance?        
I think I would ask the students to get into small groups to rate each others' bibliographies. They could ask each other about the quality of the sources each student in the group chose (if they're peer-reviewed, recent, etc.), and this discussion would help them learn to self-assess their own bibliographies in the future.

4. “FIDeLity” Feedback
What procedures can you develop that will allow you to give students feedback that is:

• Frequent  
• Immediate  
• Discriminating, i.e., based on clear criteria and standards  
• Lovingly delivered  

For the bibliography assignment (or similar tasks), I could ask students to prepare a draft of an assignment/activity before we meet in class. We could spend 5-10 minutes in class to add sources or otherwise improve the bibliography (with peer review/feedback), and then they could email me their final draft of the assignment/activity the day after we meet. This strategy accommodates both frequent and immediate feedback. (I'd need to respond to the final drafts in a timely manner as well.)

If I asked students to prepare a draft before our class meeting, I'd include clear criteria and standards with the details of the assignment (which I'd ask the First Year Seminar instructor to share with the class a few days before our library session). This would cover the discriminating part.

To be empathetic in delivering feedback, I'd include contextualizing comments and suggestions for improvement, rather than demands. This part of the feedback process is simplified since I am not grading these students, and am meeting with them as a provider of academic support.

"Instructional Design Essentials" Week 1 (Part 2)

That last post was getting long, so here's the second part of my Week 1 assignment:

Fink's Guide, p11-12 ("Questions for Formulating Significant Learning Goals")
A year (or more) after this course is over, I want and hope that students will ______.

1. Foundational Knowledge (key information and key ideas):
I want students to be able to search for and access library resources (mainly books and journal articles), to evaluate these sources and those they find on the web, to have strategies for brainstorming search terms and for broadening or narrowing their searches.

2. Application Goals (thinking [critical thinking, creative thinking, practical thinking] and skills):
My main application goal at this point is have students develop their critical thinking skills. I want them to evaluate their sources carefully, and get a sense of when it's appropriate to use a particular source and when other sources might better match their needs.

3. Integration Goals (connections between ideas, perspectives, and students' personal/social/work lives):
I hope they can adapt and integrate the evaluation strategies we use in class to their larger information landscape (online and television news, political commentary, blogs, other popular/general reading, etc.).

4. Human Dimensions Goals (learning about themselves and others):
I hope my students learn that they have a unique voice...one that has a place in scholarly discourse. I want them to know they don't have to just parrot or report on what others have already thought or said on a topic, but rather that they can synthesize information and meaningfully contribute to the conversation.

5. Caring Goals (adopting values or changing their feelings, interests, or ideas):
Hmm. I'll have to think about this one a little. I want students to care about their studies, what they're learning, and make the most of their time in college?

6. "Learning-How-To-Learn" Goals (will students learn to be good students in this type of course, how to learn about this particular subject, how to become a self-directed learner, etc.?):
I'm very interested in helping students become independent, self-directed learners. That whole  "give-a-man-a-fish" versus "teach-a-man-to-fish" idea.

"Instructional Design Essentials" Week 1

Hello everyone! I'm the social sciences librarian at the CSB/SJU Libraries. I'm using this blog to reflect upon experiences in my "Instructional Design Essentials"  ALA Editions eCourse. This is what I'll be working on this week:

BLOG POST (Due by September 21): Your first post will be briefly establishing your focus for this course, choose what works best for your goals whether it's instruction you will do in the future, instruction you have done previously, or if you have neither of those options available to you, make up a teaching scenario that you would like to use. Read pages 1-6 of  Fink's Guide and use your blog to complete the worksheet on page 7. Then read pages 8-10 and use your blog to complete the questions on pages 11-12 to begin parsing out goals for your instruction.

So, without further ado:

Fink's Guide, p7 ("Situational Factors to Consider")

1. Specific Context of the Teaching/Learning Situation
How many students are in the class? Is the course lower division, upper division, or graduate level? How long and frequent are the class meetings? How will the course be delivered: live, online, or in a classroom or lab? What physical elements of the learning environment will affect the class?

I'm going to focus on instruction to one of my First Year Seminar (FYS) classes. Each librarian at my institution is paired with about 8-10 sections of this year-long class; we meet with each section a couple of times each semester (so it's like a one-shot-plus). The course is capped at 16 students. Classes are either MWF for 55 minutes each or TTh for 80 minutes each. Courses are taught in person in our library's training lab, which has computer stations for each student.

2. General Context of the Learning Situation
What learning expectations are placed on this course or curriculum by: the university, college and/or department? the profession? society?

The FYS Course Learning Goals include the following: 
"Discover and practice sound principles of information literacy and effective use of information technology by becoming familiar with library resources and staff."

Our Library Goals for FYS follow the basic know/access/evaluate/use/use ethically model. We also state on our library's website that our FYS instruction sessions will help students to analyze and evaluate research sources; understand scholarly vs. non-scholarly publications; develop search strategies for specific assignments; use of the catalog and online periodical indexes; find specialized resources relevant to the discipline; understand the basics on conducting research (e.g. topic narrowing, using primary sources, citation, etc.).

3. Nature of the Subject Is this subject primarily theoretical, practical, or a combination? Is the subject primarily convergent or divergent? Are there important changes or controversies occurring within the field?

Each section of FYS has a different topical focus, and each instructor develops their own syllabi and assignments, so library instruction isn't always consistent from one section to the next. Past instruction sessions have often been heavily focused on teaching tools like our library catalog, specific databases, or citation management software. I would like to spend less time lecturing and demo-ing in front of the class and instead foster more active learning and nuanced evaluation.

4. Characteristics of the Learners
What is the life situation of the learners (e.g., working, family, professional goals)? What prior knowledge, experiences, and initial feelings do students usually have about this subject? What are their learning goals, expectations, and preferred learning styles?

Most of our FYS students are traditional first-year undergraduates at our small, residential, liberal arts institution. Their existing library research experience varies a lot.   

5. Characteristics of the Teacher
What beliefs and values does the teacher have about teaching and learning? What is his/her attitude toward: the subject? students? What level of knowledge or familiarity does s/he have with this subject? What are his/her strengths in teaching?

The teacher (I assume this means me as the librarian teaching the instruction session, and not their FYS teacher!) thinks working with students is the best part of her job! I also feel pressed for time and a little "stuck" with how I structure my sessions. I want to be able to help students learn the skills they'll need to really thrive in college (and to be lifelong learners, critical thinkers, and intellectually curious types, etc. etc.). I was all about Paolo Freire and critical pedagogy and getting past the banking model of education in grad school, but have found it hard to apply these concepts in my own one-shot instruction sessions.