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. You’ve done nice work! Please see the following few comments: - Course Design - You seem to have grasped the main ideas and demonstrated a few things that I’m glad to see. First, the use of the learned capability verbs for most of your unit objectives is accurate. The only thing to note is that on your ICM, you have the instructional goal as “Students will be able to create a Google page to display their original work as well as critiques and analyzations of classic and contemporary poems.” Regardless of the fact that we sometimes use “create” and “generate” interchangeably in many situations of life and work, a preference for the standard capability verbs is obvious in instructional design, especially for this IDA. So just keep this part of ICM consistent with your written instructional goal as indicated in your IDA. (I'm wondering whether you might decide later to split “analyzations of classic and contemporary poetry” into two different goals. But I’m a layman with respect to analyzing different types of poetry and feel unsure whether the processes can be very different. So relying on your knowledge in this area, see how things play out when you get into lesson design and/or instructional development.) Second, the sequence of your units and your presentation of their relationship with the instructional goal in the ICM are very clear and appropriate. Last, in your Unit 1 objective, you accurately used the standard capacity verb, but “demonstrate an understanding” still isn't sufficient to define an observable behavior. You may think a little deeper about the kind of things that students do that enable you to check their understanding of the poetic terms and then reword this objective. So it’s important to write an objective as specifically as possible to define an observable behavior that the learner will be able to do. - Unit Design - You have nicely listed the prerequisite skills, and your lesson objectives seem to lead to the unit goal. There are only three things to be noted: First, lesson 1 objective is “rule-using” type of objective. So it’s recommended that you use the standard capability verb “demonstrate” here and restate the objective as “SWBAT demonstrate how to create a G-mail account and a Google page”. Second, as I commented on your unit 1 objective above, you need to state specific, observable behaviors in an objective so that people can tell whether students can do the specified things. Similar to “demonstrate an understanding”, “demonstrate knowledge” is not something observable either. In addition, the behavior of “displaying their original poetry analyzations uploaded to the Google page” does not look sufficient for demonstrating student’s knowledge if your focus is on checking students’ poetry analysis capability. If you meant to emphasize their skills to put poetry analyzation on to a web page, you may want to reword the objective as “SWBAT demonstrate how to upload their original poetry analyzations to the Google page.” Third, when it comes to supporting objectives at the course design level, they should be either in the verbal information ("state", "discriminate", "recite", etc.) or attitudinal ("choose") domain of learning. It’s good to see that you included attitudinal objectives. However, your use of the attitudinal objectives in this ICM seems to indicate a misunderstanding. “Choose” is the right word for writing an attitudinal objective, but the behavior described in your supporting objectives are not attitudinal in nature. Actually, they are rule-using (or lower level) type of objective because they (at least “choose a design and layout for their Google page”) requires certain level of skills in using technology and content knowledge to make decisions and execute actions. Assuming the two behaviors require enough intellectual effort to qualify them for “rule-using”, I will recommend tostate the objectives as “SWBAT demonstrate how to determine at least 2 classic poetry analyzations and at least one contemporary poetry analyzation to display on their portfolio page” and “SWBAT demonstrate how to choose a design and layout for their Google page.” But if you want to use them as supporting objectives here, it would be better to list them as verbal objectives "SWBAT state the steps to determine at least 2 classic poetry analyzations and at least one contemporary poetry analyzation to display on their portfolio page" and “SWBAT state the steps to choose a design and layout for their Google page.” In the representation of the ICM, these two goals should be connected with the lesson objectives with a line and a triangle with a letter "V". Please let me know if you have questions about my feedback. Keep up the good work! Ying [Greg's note: I approve of Ying's excellent feedback. Much of what she has written should sound familiar from what we have gone over in class. I would also just comment that "analyzations" is a very uncommon form for this word. You should probably use "analyses" instead.]
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. |