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 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. You delineated the instructional components clearly and presented them in a reasonable sequence. 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. A few things about the specifics of your IDA should be noted: ---Course design---- 1. After the classes of the past two weeks, you may have been quite familiar with the requirement of using standard capability verbs for the objectives. Some of your objective verbs are very specific but not “standard” in terms of indicating the level of intellectual skills the objectives require. Some of the verbs in your objectives, however, are somewhat fuzzy (e.g. “utilize”). So I recommend you restate the objectives at all levels with the learned capability verbs. For example, for the course objective, it could be stated as “Teachers and staff will be able to demonstrate using United Streaming resources in planning and classroom instruction.” 2. For the course ICM, it will be good to include the course title at the top of the map so that the audience knows what this is about. The unit objectives are presented in a proper sequence, but they normally need to be put there “linearly”. So simply moving them into a straight line will be fine. The last thing to add is there should be upward arrows at the end of the jointing lines, indicating the instruction for one objective leads to the next one until the course objective is achieved. ---Unit design---- 1. When restating one of the unit objectives in step 1 (unit 2 objective in your case), it’s better to state that exactly the same as the objective you drafted in the course design to ensure consistency and avoid confusion. 2. In your lesson 1, the objective states “Teachers and staff will be able to list areas of planning and instruction in which enhancement/improvement is desired”. The verb “list”, however, is a standard capability verb representing verbal information 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. If more complex intellectual skills or effort were involved and this was just a matter of wording, you may consider reword the statement as something like “Teachers and staff will be able to generate a list of areas of planning and instruction in which enhancement/improvement is desired.” Similarly, the objective for lesson 3 has the same issue, and you may consider restate that as well. [Note from Greg: Ying is right on the money here, except that if you re-formulate these objectives, you should avoid saying "generate a list," because if it is a list you are after, then it is still a verbal information item and still has the same problem.] 3. In the lesson 2 objective, the phrase of “demonstrate knowledge of…” is also a little fuzzy to instructional designers. Since you already mentioned the specific action that the learners will take to show their knowledge, what about simply saying “Teachers and staff will demonstrate accessing areas of United Streaming programming which meet their planning and instructional needs”? [Note from Greg: Yes, "demonstrate knowledge of" or "demonstrate understanding," etc., is definitely a no-no, as we discussed in class.] 4. The entry behaviors 2 says “Teachers and staff will be able to access United Streaming” and 3 says “Teachers and staff will be able to conduct a search through United Streaming and navigate through the site”. Are they different from the unit 1 objective you wrote in the course design? 5. There are a few things to note about representation of you ICM. First, the supporting objective in verbal information domain-- “Teachers and staff will summarize how United Streaming has or has not been of benefit to their planning and instruction” only needs to be connected to the lesson 3 objective. The line connecting it with the unit objective should be deleted, and a triangle with “V” in it should be added in the middle of the line that connects this supporting objective and lesson 3 objective. Second, as suggested for your course ICM, please “align” the lesson objectives and the unit objective so that they stand in a vertical straight line. Last, the entry behaviors should collectively point to the lesson objective at the bottom of the map (lesson 1 objective in this case). You may refer to Dr. Rieber’s unit ICM example for how that looks specifically. That’s all I have to comment on your IDA. Thanks for your effort! Ying [Note from Greg: I approve of Ying's feedback, along with the couple of notes I have added.]
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. |