Your IDA was evaluated by: Rui Hu

Overall Instructor Rating: Satisfactory

Ratings explanation:

• Exemplary - A model answer in almost every way (this is given out very rarely).
• Satisfactory - Very well done; you've met the expectations of the assignment. There are some minor problems, so read my feedback well.
• Marginal Pass - You pass, but there are lots of issues to consider. Read my feedback very carefully and be sure you understand the points/issues I raise.
• Not satisfactory, redo and resubmit - The assignment was not completed appropriately. I am concerned that you do not understand the process well enough yet. To get credit for the assignment, you need to redo it, most probably on another topic. Read and consider my feedback very carefully before redoing.

Instructor's Overall Feedback:

Your Course & Unit Design IDA is very good. 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). Your ICMs are very beautiful. But for the course ICM, the direction of the whole chart should be top-down instead of bottom-top, which means that the instructional design process is a top-down flow itself. First we have to decide what is the overall instructional goal for the whole course, so the most top part should be the terminal course objective. And then we need to break the big objective into smaller parts, which are the units. So the unit objectives are in the center. We keep breaking the instructional blocks into smaller ones, which are lessons and subordinate skills. So the lessons and subordinate skills should be put on the bottom. When the learners start to learn, they should start form the bottom. First they learn some subordinate skills, and then they accomplish each individual lessons, and then units, finally they accomplish the course objective. Those prerequisites should be learned before the learners start the course, so they should be on the most bottom of the ICM, separated with a dotted line or a colored line. Besides, the objectives that you wrote in your ICMs do not match those written in your text responses to the IDA. Dr. Rieber asks to have identical objectives both form your written descriptions of your objectives and your ICMs. Please see his DreamWeaver course objective analysis ICM and the other one: Course design - http://www.nowhereroad.com/instructionaldesign/asp/IDA/course-icm.html Unit design - http://it.coe.uga.edu/~lrieber/edit6170/rieber-dw-unit-icm.htm I also noticed that you used quite a few “diamond-shapes” in your ICMs. This shape usually means making decisions, so unless you really think the current unit is where the learners should make their decisions, otherwise I think you may want to stay with regular rectangles. Selected Unit I think you are a little confused here (just a little). The first step for this was to copy and paste one of your Unit objectives -- verbatim -- from Part into step 1. You didn't do this, but instead wrote a kind of new unit objective “Learners will select and collect information on relevant literature using the various functions within each search engine”. The idea in Unit design is simply to continue the design, but at a much more specific level, down to the concepts and supporting facts (verbal information). Using standard verbs I suggest you try to add the standard capability verbs discussed in the course materials (generate, demonstrate, identify, etc.) in ALL of your objectives to make it clear what learning outcome you are aiming for. (You provided this some of the time, but not always.) So it was hard to see whether your objectives were on the right intellectual level. For example, your terminal course objective was very nice as “Students will be able to refine their literature search methods by building their knowledge of the capabilities and resources offered by the GALILEO literature search engine”, but it was hard to identify it as an intellectual learning outcome because “refine” sounds more like a psychomotor verb. Please see Dr. Rieber’s online resource: http://www.nowhereroad.com/instructionaldesign/asp/IDA/learning-outcomes.html to get more sense of it. The reason why this is important is that it is hard for me to tell otherwise what learning outcomes your various objectives are aiming for. Being able to know is crucial so I can give you feedback on whether or not you have any violations of learning hierarchies. 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. Identify supporting objectives from the verbal information and attitudinal domains Your supporting objective of “Learners will select and collect information on relevant literature using the various functions within each electronic database” is neither verbal information nor an attitudinal domain supporting objective. It is still in the intellectual domain. An objective such as “SWABT list the database names that they will use for their academic research for good literature” can be verbal information supporting objective. Note from Lloyd: As Maggie points out, your ICMs do not match your text entries, so I think you are a little confused as to the purpose of the ICMs. However, most of your text responses look good to me, so it is clear that you understand the fundamentals of course and unit design. One troubling point for me, though, was that your unit objective and the supporting objective you wrote for the unit look almost identical. Your supporting objective should have been a verbal information learning outcome (and I would have liked to have seen also a supporting attitudinal objective). Let me know if you have any questions.

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.