Instructional Design Activity: Course Design
Your IDA was evaluated by: Rui Hu Overall Instructor Rating: Satisfactory Ratings explanation:
Instructor's Overall Feedback: You did a fine job with this IDA. You just have a few typical problems that people new to course and unit design usually experience. Fixing these problems will not be difficult, so please read my feedback carefully and let me know if you have any questions. Your ICMs Thanks for providing the ICMs -- it's always easier to react to course and unit design when shown visually. And, the act of creating flow charts helps the design process -- a visual shows the course structure in a way that a list cannot, such as by showing which units build on each other (which they all seem to do in your case). I noticed that the terminal course objective in your course level ICM was different from what you stated in part 1. You may want to change this in your final project. In addition, the objective of “SWBAT demonstrate an increase in their job performance” looks too broad and it was not much instructional related. Your objectives As your buddy commented, your terminal course objective looks combined two different objectives: “using the tools available to them via their Blackberry/Nextel cell phone systems” and “reporting their performance to appropriate managers”. It really mixes in a wide variety of learning outcomes, so my recommendation is to sift out and write out, individually, each of the individual objectives represented in it. Unit level needs to address concepts It is typical for a Unit ICM to address concept learning, whereas you stayed at the level of rule-using ("demonstrate") for your lesson 1,2 and3 objectives. It's important in a Unit-level ICM to get more specific, so I recommend that you add the concept learning to this ICM (just keep this in mind when you do your final project). Violation of a learning hierarchy There is one important problem that you need to address, namely a violation of a learning hierarchy. I notice that your terminal course objective was on rule-using level, which is to demonstrate the performance. But your following unit 2 objective was on the problem-solving level, which was to “generate a report to be delivered quarterly identifying their performance compared to their goal”. Recall from the class readings and presentations that according to Gagne, learning in the intellectual skills domain proceeds in a sequential order, starting with concepts (“identify,” “classify”), then rules (“demonstrate”), then problem-solving (“generate”). If the order is altered, such as expecting problem-solving before mastering an important prerequisite rule, then learning will not occur. Click here for a resource that explains the importance of a learning hierarchy and its relationship within the 5 domains of learning. Click here for a resource that summarizes the relationships within the 5 domains of learning and lists the "learned capability verbs" that I recommend you use to help keep straight the various learning outcomes as you write objectives. And, keep in mind that we have yet to "formally" introduce how to write objectives, so that skill will become clearer in the days to come.
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. |