Instructional Design Activity: Course Design
Your IDA was evaluated by: Greg Clinton Overall Instructor Rating: Satisfactory Ratings explanation:
Instructor's Overall Feedback: Thanks for providing the ICMs -- I focused mainly on those in giving you feedback (it's always easier to react to a visual). I know you put effort in here, and I think I see your thought process fairly well. You are generally on the right track, but there are some issues I need to address. -- Course Design -- First, you seem to understand the general sequencing of instruction pretty well. I see the general logic of the steps you've laid out in your course design. You've also been careful to use "SWBAT" consistently in this ICM. And you've presented the attitudinal goal appropriately at the top right, and the prerequisite at the bottom, separated by a dotted line. I think the two major issues for you here at the course level are the wording of your objectives and the scope of your design. As for scope, it is hard to imagine it taking an entire course to teach the skill you have chosen for your overall course goal. And the unit objectives reflect this, for they really look like lesson objectives or even parts of a lesson. It's not that your course goal didn't pass the tests at the beginning of the IDA. It isn't too fuzzy and it does represent a learning outcome that is at least at the rule-using level if not higher. Nonetheless, it is clear from your unit ICM that you had a hard time putting together a meaningful unit to correspond any of these substeps from your course design. So, what to do? I imagine you and your teammates have already been working on some initial plans for your project. So the two things that need to happen are: 1)your team needs to do something with appropriate scope for your project, and 2) for the coming IDAs you'll want to resolve this issue. The IDAs are just exercises, so you can even continue on this topic if you want; but when you do the lesson design IDA you will probably need to adopt one of your *unit* objectives from this IDA, call it a lesson objective, and then create a lesson to teach that objective. Hopefully that will help keep the lesson design IDA from becoming too frustrating. Beyond the scope issue, you do need to be sure to include the appropriate learned capability verbs with each objective. As you know, these special verbs serve as markers to show what level of intellectual skill you are teaching. My guess is that the whole learned capability verb thing was confusing partly because of the scope issue. After all, your first several "unit" objectives seem to be substeps of one simple procedural skill. "Find the Galileo website within the CMS MC website" sounds like more of a discrimination rather than one of the higher levels of concepts or rule-using (unless I'm missing something important here). As one example that is a little higher, your objective "SWBAT search for a term in the Compton's ..." does look like a rule-using skill. And thus you should consider something like "SWBAT demonstrate searching for a term in the Compton's ..." But I can't tell much difference between this objective and the course goal. So in essence this seems to be not a separate unit objective leading towards the course outcome, but the course outcome itself. One idea to possibly consider is to have as your course goal to generate a brief essay based on search results. In this way you can teach the search skills but also have students apply them towards a problem-solving level task (most any free-writing task can be considered a problem solving activity). Of course, if you do, you'll need to either teach the essay-writing skills (and I realize that may be a whole other ballgame) or identify them as prerequisite skills. In any case ... when you move up in scope I think you'll find that things fall into place a little better when it comes to putting together well-formed objectives with the correct learned capability verbs. (Also note that some of your teammates are working with teaching search skills in their IDAs. You might want to compare notes with them about how they are working toward a high enough level course outcome and teasing out the unit objectives and lesson objectives.) -- Unit Design -- Your terminal objective for this unit seems to come from the one I mentioned above (though the wording has changed a bit between the two ICMs). So please see my note above for suggested wording. Here, again, I believe the first step you've presented "Learners will identify the search window on Compton's ..." is probably a discrimination task, very small in scope and not necessarily requiring a separate lesson. The next step is really a verbal information item supporting the third step. It should be presented in the standard fashion for verbal information (accompanied by a V in a triangle). The third step seems to be a matter of clicking the Search button, so "execute" may be appropriate, but once again I don't think this is a large enough step to require a lesson to itself. Meantime, I would use SWBAT for all lesson objectives. So ... that's all I have for this IDA. I have given you a "satisfactory" because I think the fundamentals were there. But you do need to be aware of the issues I've described above and make sure you understand my feedback. Thanks for your hard work! Greg
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. |