Turn in:

Online Teaching Worksheet (35 points) - September 15

Topic, Goals, and Learner Analysis due to Critical Friend Sunday October 6

Planning Grid due to Critical Friend Sunday October 13

Course Map and Assessment Plan due to Critical Friend Sunday October 27

Final ID Plan (50 points) - November 3

Present Course (see Adobe Connect module - 65 points total) - final weeks

Final Course and Peer Reviews (70 points + 35 points) - December 13

Major Project: The Instructional Module

Objectives:

You will:

  • Describe and use the main features of learning management systems to create online environments.
  • Design asynchronous educational experiences for a specific learning audience, following the instructional design process.
  • Create measurable learning objectives and align assessments and activities to those objectives, using Merrill's First Principles model of instructional design as a guide.

Module Overview

In the major project for this course, you will use a course management system online to design, develop, and facilitate an asychronous instructional module on a topic of your choosing. Your module should be short enough that you can actually finish creating and assembling all content - a good rule of thumb is that the instruction should take the average student about 2-5 hours to complete. This can be a single complete module of a larger course that you may have in mind (i.e., a module on circles in a course on Geometry), although it could also be a simpler standalone course as well (i.e., a course in basic digital photography).

Each module will be built in your choice of Blackboard, Moodle, Lore.com, or MyBigCampus.com (work with the instructor to make the choice that is most advantageous to you and your professional goals) using tools including the announcements, syllabus, course documents/handouts, at least one discussion forum or other collaborative tool, and at least one assessment instrument. Throughout the development of this project, you will share your progress and each instructional design planning deliverable with your critical friend. This way, in addition to formative feedback you receive from the instructor, you will also receive valuable feedback and suggestions from your critical friend, and in turn, you will be helping your colleague in the same manner.

There are several phases that you will go through in developing this project, which will take up most of the semester. Deliverables will be turned in and discussed periodically throughout the course, much of it coinciding with the topics of our four discussion modules that we will engage with for a good part of the semester. Toward the final third of our class, you will spend time working closely with your chosen course mangement system to construct your course, and you will present it to us live in an Adobe Connect webinar, "teaching" your module to us as if we were your students. Read each step carefully below to learn more about the entire journey we will take.

Procedures

Step 1: Complete Online Teaching Worksheet

Download the Online Teaching worksheet as a Word document, and complete the worksheet entries to brainstorm the instructional unit you will develop and implement as the final project in this course. Completing this worksheet will be the first step in exploring a possible topic for your instructional unit, and you will share your brainstorms with your critical friend to receive his/her feedback. Your worksheet will be evaluated based on the completeness and quality of your responses.

You may wish to read the now-classic article from M. David Merrill (PDF) explaining his first principles model, as this will help form the basis of our approach to designing our course modules this semester. The Merrill model shares many similarities to other models that you may be aware of, although it tends to be regarded as a more "modern" model of instructional design than traditional systematic approaches, such as the Dick and Carey and Morrison, Ross, and Kemp models.

Note: If you need brushing up on writing objectives, check out http://ets.tlt.psu.edu/learningdesign/objectives/writingobjectives or watch the Module podcast.

Step 2: Identify Topic, Goals, Learner Analysis

After having explored your topic in step 1, decide if you are sticking with that topic for your instructional module. Clearly identify the topic for your instructional module and give a brief overview of the module. Be sure to also explain the problem that the module will address (i.e., Why are you developing this module? What purpose does it serve?). You should also identify the overall goals the instructional module will accomplish. These should not be as specific as the instructional objectives you will identify in step 4; instead they should be more general and focused on the practical, "real world" aspects of the topic.

Finally, you should give a brief description of your target audience. Who will benefit from this instruction? What are their ages? Academic backgrounds? Experience with technology? Ethnicity and/or gender? Socioeconomic status? Social characteristics? General characteristics? Describe as much as is applicable to your situation. Submit these initial planning components to your critical friend in your shared discussion forum.

For some insights and help as you start this and the entire ID Planning process, you might want to investigate the videos posted by Dr. Curtis Bonk at YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/user/TravelinEdMan. Dr. Bonk is a noted expert in online learning and has a lot of very useful things to say on the subject.

Step 3: Complete Planning Grid

Use this planning grid (Word DOC) to outline your objectives and instructional strategies for your instructional module. You will begin with your instructional tasks and related objectives. For each objective, describe the related activation, demonstration, application, and integration strategies that will be used to engage, teach, and assess learners. All activities and assessments MUST be in alignment with your objectives.

Be sure to watch the video screencast and the chapter on creating the planning grid. If you need additional help with writing objectives, check out http://ets.tlt.psu.edu/learningdesign/objectives/writingobjectives. Try to stay with the ABCD (Audience-Behavior-Condition-Degree) formula and use action verbs ( "understand" does not count!) to help you ensure that your objectives are measurable and complete.

Submit your draft planning grid to your critical friend in your shared discussion forum. You may view an example of an example of a partial planning grid, and look to the completed ID Plan examples below for further insights. Note that previous semesters used a different planning grid and instructional design model, although the differences are primarily in arrangement of content and approach, but not the content itself. Objectives are still objectives, assessments are still assessments - the new planning grid that we are using just organizes these things a little differently. It may even occur to you that you may prefer one model or style of planning over the other, and you may wish to share these reflections with your critical friend as you work.

Step 4: Course Map and Assessment Plan

Using the elements of the instructional strategies you articulated in your planning grid (step 3), sequence your instruction and create a course map. The format of the map is up to you and will depend upon you, your learners, and your content. It may take the form of a narrative, an outline, an Inspiration flowchart, storyboard, or any other format that you feel suitably conveys the sequence of your instruction. Be creative!

Include with the course map the final section of your ID Plan, the assessment plan. How will you know when the learning objectives have been met? What sorts of quizzes, rubrics, checklists, or other methods might you use to assess your objectives? Describe in more detail the assessment items you have identified on your planning grid, including samples of rubrics, quizzes, and other items that you are planning to include in your final course. Note that you do not need to have complete versions of all of your assessments at this stage - a representative sample with description should be enough for us to understand how the achievement of learning objectives will be evaluated.

Be sure to watch the video screencast's segment on creating the course map and assessment plan.

Submit your course map and assessment plan to your critical friend in your shared discussion forum.

At this point, you should have received access Moodle (you already have access to BlackBoard, but Moodle must be manually entered by the instructor) to begin putting this course map into reality. You may sign yourself up for free at Lore.com, and you may request an invite from me to MyBigCampus.com as per http://mbcurl.me/4FM, or if you are a teacher at a school already using MBC, you may use your own account.

Keep in mind as you explore the course management systems that you are required to include at least one asynchronous discussion and at least one quiz or rubric in your course. Each of you will be assigned to become "students" in another student's class (see Step 6), so your course should be complete or nearly complete by this time so you can adequately act as a facilitator.

Step 5: Create/Compile Complete Instructional Design Plan for Module

Based on the work you have done on this project thus far, you have compiled a fairly comprehensive instructional design plan that outlines the instructional module you will create in Blackboard, Moodle, Lore, or MyBigCampus (you should choose the delivery system that makes the most sense for your project).

Your instructional design plan should be formatted into one document and contain the following sections (click here to see rubric):

    1. Executive Summary (brief overview that summarizes the entire module and what is included in the full ID plan)
    2. Introduction (including problem statement and goals)
    3. Learner analysis
    4. Instructional objectives and First Principles strategies (i.e., your revised planning grid)
    5. Course map
    6. Assessment items/plan

Much of this document will be copied and pasted from your previous submissions to your critical friend (with revisions as necessary of course), though you may need to reformat and restructure your writing to suit a single document. While you may include tables, charts, and bulleted lists to help communicate your information, this document should generally be a narrative. So if you include visual representations of information, be sure that you introduce and explain them in the narrative.

References are not required but may be helpful. If you do cite sources, be sure that they are in APA style.

The following documents are previously submitted ID Plans that might serve as good models or examples if you need help visualizing the assignment, or pieces within the assignment. Note that there is certainly not one correct way to format and present your document, however.

(removed for privacy)

Submit your instructional design plan directly to the instructor in the given assignment dropbox in BlackBoard Learn. Please carefully examine the evaluation rubric for this activity so you know what is expected.

Step 6: Construct and Facilitate Instructional Module in Blackboard Learn or Moodle

Based on your course map and instructional design plan, you need to construct and finalize your instructional module in a BlackBoard Learn Master Course, in the School of Education's Moodle environment, Lore.com, or MyBigCampus.com. You should feel free to use any and all components of the learning environment you have chosen, but you should also spend some time interacting with your "students" during this time. This means that you might have them participate in a discussion forum, complete a quiz, post announcements, or even have them complete one of your assignments and score them on your assessment system/rubric. Whatever the case, it should be clear to both your participants and the instructor (who will observe) what is expected of students and how you will be interacting with them and thus, conducting the course.

First, you must submit that you are ready for your peer to find your work and tell them how to access it (BlackBoard, Lore, Moodle, MBC). Submissions are due before the initial presentations of final modules begin. You will then be assigned to evaluate ONE of your peers' courses, and you must facilitate your own course for your peer reviewer as well, as outlined in the paragraph above. You will use the same evaluation rubric that I will use to assess the modules (click here to download). You should complete the evaluations thoughtfully and critically. Once complete, you should post your evaluation form to the Peer Review assessment in BlackBoard for your peer and me to review.

Returned peer evaluations with the shortened Quality Matters rubric are due by the end of the semester (though preferably earlier) and are worth 35 points for a complete and thorough review. Remember that you MUST submit your instructions on how to access your course BEFORE your peer can evaluate!

By the end of the semester, you must have submitted your peer evaluations to the instructor and to your peers, and you must have submitted your work (ID Plan and Adobe Connect presentation link) in TaskStream to be graded as a program portfolio entry. The same abbreviated version of the Quality Matters Rubric that you used in your reviews will be used to assess your performance on the creation, presentation, and overall conducting of your course module, equaling 70 total points (2 points per item in the rubric, or 35x2). Please carefully examine the evaluation rubric (a Word document) so you know what is expected.

Final Step: Present a Synchronous Webinar

See the Adobe Connect Module in our course for more on the Adobe Connect webinar, which is the final presentation this semester. This will give you a chance to not only show off your course, but to also act as the instructor, teaching us about your course content.