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 a good job! 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. You have used the learned capability verbs for some of your unit objectives, and the use of standard capability verbs is accurate where you used them (e.g., “generate”, demonstrate”. The sequence of your units and your presentation of their relationship with the instructional goal in the ICM are very clear and appropriate. In addition, you’ve done a good job learning to use Inspiration for creation of curriculum maps. There are also a few things to note regarding your unit objectives and your ICM: 1) Now that the use of learned capability verbs has been covered and emphasized in our class last week, please consider applying them to all the objectives in both course and unit designs. Specifically, the course goal that states “SWBAT identify and choose books that are appropriate for their grade/reading level after completion of the course” can be restated as something like “SWBAT generate a list of books (or demonstrate selecting books) that are appropriate for their grade/reading level after completion of the course”. (Although “identify” is one of the standard verbs, it indicates a lower level intellectual skill that doesn’t match with your instruction.) Similarly, the verb “compile” in the original unit 2 objective “Learners will compile a list of their idea of appropriate titles by visiting the media center and gathering books” can be replaced as “generate” to reflect the level of intellectual skills that the students are expected to develop. 2) Some work needs to be done to improve the Unit 2 objective. A parallel of three objectives for that unit is not only confusing but also not aligned with what is presented as unit 2 objective in your ICM. As you may recall, the course and unit design IDA does not encourage inclusion of multiple goals or objectives in one unit/lesson. Actually, No.1 and No.3 of the objectives are repeating the other two unit objectives (unit 1 objective- “Learners will compile a list of their idea of appropriate titles by visiting the media center and gathering books” and unit 3 objective-“SWBAT generate a response to literature that includes a summary, opinion, and connection to the text”). This even made me wonder whether it was simply a big “typo”. What you should do here can be as simple as to keep consistency between the unit objectives in your IDA and ICMs. [Note from Greg - It appears that you tried to refine this unit objective in the ICM. if so, I think you had the right idea in doing so. Ying is correct in questioning the inclusion of three different objectives here in your IDA.] 3) “After reading a book that they have determined to be appropriate” in your unit 3 objective isn’t necessary because in this case it is not an instructional condition (that sometimes can be indispensable for an objective statement). 4) In terms of the ICMs, pay attention to several things. First, the circle with “choosing appropriate leisure books” in it should be explicitly indicated as “title” so that readers don’t confuse it with the course or enabling unit objectives. Second, when listing the attitudinal objectives, there should be a circle around the capital letter “A”, but no arrows to or from the objectives are needed. Accordingly, when it comes to supporting skills involving verbal information, there should be a triangle around the capital letter “V” and no arrows to or from the objectives are needed. [Note from Greg: In Inspiration, once you have created a link with an arrow, you can select the link itself and go to the Link menu>Arrow Direction and select "No Arrows." I know you are just learning Inspiration, so don't worry about this for IDA purposes. But for your team project, you'll want to make sure you and your teammates have figured this stuff out.] ---Unit design--- For the unit you developed, there are several things to be noted: 1) In step 1, only one unit objective should be stated instead of all that you decided in the course design because the following steps are the instructional procedures to achieve this particular objective. 2) As mentioned in my course design comments, standard capability verbs should be used for all the unit and lesson level objectives. Pay special attention when you attempt to use “learn” because you may know by now that it’s one of the several fuzziest word in education. Try to figure out the specific behaviors of students that you hope to see after they have “learned” something and use corresponding action verbs instead (sometimes you need to use these verbs in conjunction with the standard capability verbs). 3) A big issue in this unit design is the use of multiple statements in one objective. This has also been discussed in the previous section, and you should be aware that it is not common to do so in instructional design. If the statement following the first one can be stated as a means to achieve the goal/objective described in the first statement, you can do so. Otherwise, if it truly represents another skill, it’s better to separate them as a different objective. In lesson 3, for example, “Discuss why the book they chose is appropriate” can be left out without loss of the meaning. Another thing is that the objectives stated in your design are not completely congruent with the ones in the ICM (the ICM doesn’t include that many objectives for each lesson). It should be noted that consistency is needed between the IDA and ICMs. 4) As pointed out previously for the ICM, there should be a triangle around the capital letter V but no arrows are needed. 5) The supporting objectives and entry skills are appropriate and correctly presented in the ICM. 6) The last important thing to note-- in the ICM, the order in which the objectives are presented is completely reversed when compared to your IDA. The suggestion is to move the three lesson objective circles around and make them reflect the same order that you will present the lessons in the unit design. One last question to ask-- how is this unit design different from the course design? It seems to me very similar if not identical with the overall course design. Do things come in a cycle here? Thanks for your effort. Please let me know if there are any questions. Ying [Note from Greg: I agree with Ying that what you are trying to teach in your unit looks a lot like what you are trying to teach in your overall course. I think your scope is simply too small - it just doesn't seem like it would take an entire course to teach students how to select appropriate leisure books. I recommend that you take on something larger than this for your team project. Along with my notes here and there above, I approve of Ying's feedback.]
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. |