Instructional Design Activity: Course Design
Your IDA was evaluated by: Ying Liu Overall Instructor Rating: Satisfactory Ratings explanation:
Instructor's Overall Feedback: Thanks for providing the ICMs. It has been very helpful for me to understand your course and unit design and to evaluate how well you have understood the instructions that prepare you for this IDA. This is a very well-done IDA! You surely have got the essence of course and unit design. I only have a few comments on both your course and unit design: You do seem to have grasped the main ideas and demonstrated a few things that I’m glad to see. First, your objectives are very well written. You delineated the instructional components clearly in an accumulative way so that learning that is required for achieving the terminal goal can happen step by step. In the IDA, the unit and lesson objectives are arranged properly, although most of them appear non-hierarchical in terms of instructional sequence and can be taught as parallels. However, representation of these objectives is a little confusing in your ICMs, which will be discussed in detail when I comment on your ICMs. Second, you did a good job appropriately using the learned capability verbs for different levels of objectivities. The verbs you selected to describe the objectives accurately reflect the level of intellectual skills required for completing those tasks and make the objectives high enough in the learning hierarchy to constitute instructional units they claim to be. Last, you did a great job identifying the supporting skills and entry behaviors and representing them using Inspiration. Two things, however, should be noted as you represent the supporting skills in the unit ICM. Overall, you did a very nice job drafting the objectives and delineating their relationships in the IDA, but please pay attention to a few following issues in your ICMs: First, in your course ICM, the unit objectives are presented in a triangle connected by arrows pointing to different directions. The examples that have been used in the class, however, present the objectives in a linear way with one unit leading to another. The first unit should be put at the bottom and the last one at the top (excluding the terminal goal), and all the arrows stem from the bottom and points upwards. How the unit objectives are presented is confusing to the audience because it is hard to tell in what sequence the units will be taught. If the order in which your units are presented does not matter much, there is no need to give too much thought to the sequence. However, they should be presented linearly. Second, in the unit ICM, you actually combined your course ICM and what we mean by unit ICM. The way that a unit ICM is intended to be is that the “terminal” objective here should be a unit objective rather than the overall course objective, and the lesson objectives, as enabling objectives at another level, should be presented in the same way as the unit objectives are presented to support the course objective (the real terminal goal). Supporting objectives and prerequisite skills are components of unit ICM, but they should be directly related to the lesson objectives (supporting skills can be related to unit objectives too). Therefore, a few things need to be done to fix your unit ICM: 1) Replace the course objective with the unit 2 objective. The supporting attitudinal skill for the course objective should be removed as well. 2) The lesson objectives should point to the unit 2 objective. 3) Unit 1 objective should be deleted from the ICM because it indicates a separate unit. Also, the supporting objectives (verbal information about link and URL) are actually related to lesson 3 objective and thus should be linked to that particular objective instead of unit 1 objective. 4) The prerequisite skills are well identified, but they should be pointing to the lesson objectives. 5) The last thing to remember is that when using a supporting objective (verbal information or attitudinal), there is no need to have an arrow pointing to or from the course/unit/lesson objective. A line that connects the supporting objective with the course/unit/lesson objective and has a circle containing “A” (or a triangle containing “V”) suffices. That’s all I have to comment on your IDA. Thanks for your hard work! Ying [Note from Greg: I approve of Ying's feedback. I also want to say I appreciate you wrestling with a new piece of software - Inspiration. Some of Ying's feedback is about conventions of presentation in the ICMs that you may not have figured out how to do yet - and that's perfectly ok for this IDA. For your team project, I would encourage you to learn Inspiration tricks from each other - or check with me if you get stuck - and do follow the standard ways of representing things that we are teaching. Good work!]
This activity builds on the needs assessment IDA. This IDA is divided into two parts. First, you will design a rough outline of a course. In this context, "course" is defined as an instructional entity, which has both a recognizable start and finish point, and has an organized set of content. It is the most general instructional solution to a problem identified in needs assessment. Second, you will choose one of the units from your course design and design a rough outline of that unit (of course, in the 'real world', you would do this for all of your units). The activity is designed to give you hands-on practice with course- and unit-level task analysis. |