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 well-done IDA. You seem to have grasped the main ideas and demonstrated a few things that I’m glad to see. First, you did a good job breaking down the terminal objective. The units are presented in a step-by-step manner and are pretty easy to follow, although there are other issues to talk about below. I also like the fact that you included supporting objectives not only in verbal information but also in attitudinal domain. You also seemed to explore Inspiration pretty well and produced the ICMs that help to make much sense. The following are the things to note: ----Unit design---- The major concern with the unit design is how you conceptualize and state the unit objectives. For the unit 1, 2, and 3 objectives, the verbs “identify” and “classify” are the standard capability verbs representing concepts in the hierarchy of intellectual skills. If this was what you meant, the objective is too low in the hierarchy to make it a worthy one for instruction in this situation. Remember that the course we’re designing in this IDA aims at the “rule-using” level of intellectual skills or above (problem-solving). The same requirement applies to any unit objectives. However, if more complex intellectual skills (than concepts) were involved in your intended instructional process and this was just a matter of wording, you may consider rewording the three objective statements. The most important thing is to make sure, in the first place, what kinds of intellectual skills that you really hope the learners to demonstrate after the instruction. The worst-case situation is simply that you need to re-conceptualize this IDA if “classify” and “identify” were used for their literal meaning here. You didn’t use the standard capability verbs for the unit 4 objective either, but it seems less of a concern to me. It can be easily improved by rewording the statement a little to emphasize the high level of intellectual skills required for this objective. You may consider saying “TWBAT generate a spreadsheet …., the textbook or resource…, a list of grammar skills…, and a writing piece… based on a review of the county adopted course materials”. You may also consider using something like “a set of lesson materials” to replace the long description of the specific materials (or/and put them in a parenthesis). ----Unit design---- Your use of the learned capability verbs for the lesson objectives shows that you are aware of the requirement for using the standard verbs to indicate appropriate levels of intellectual skills. It’s great to know! Here are several other little things though: 1. When you restated one of the unit objective in step 1 (unit 3 objective), you didn’t state them exactly the same as how you draft it in the course design IDA. And please be aware that a phrase like “demonstrate a knowledge/understanding/appreciation of” should always be avoided to use in instructional design. 2. One of the supporting objectives (in the verbal information domain) says “TWBAT list the key reading selections, genres of writing, and grammar concepts for the school year”. If the unit 3 objective stays the same as it is now-- “TWBAT identify key reading selections, genres of writing, and grammar concepts to be taught during the school year”, I don’t see this supporting objective as essentially different from the unit objective. Thus it’ll be crucial for you to fix the issue about unit objectives in the course design IDA before you can do something in this step. 3. In the unit design portion of your IDA, there is listed only one entry behavior as “TWBAT read and locate standards pertaining to their grade level”. The unit ICM, however, presents 6 other prerequisite skills (entry behaviors) beside this one. Did you forget to include those 6 in the IDA or there was some other reason? That’s all I have to comment on your IDA. Thank you for the hard work! Ying [Note from Greg: I approve of Ying's feedback. I also think the visual symmetry of your unit ICM is cool! But you do need to keep Ying's feedback in mind for the future. And I saw your note about the circle and triangle - no problem for now.]
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. |