EdTech 503 - Instructional Design - Topic 3 - Discussions and Instructional Design Project

Topic 3 - February 9 -15

Readings and Discussion

This was a very busy week.  The week involved continuing with our readings and discussions on select chapters from Larson and Lockee's book entitled, Streamlined ID:  A Practical Guide to Instructional Design.  We also had to prepare the first section of our Instructional Design Project - the Goal Statement and the Audience Description.

The selected Chapters for this weeks discussions were Chapters 2 and 3 and case studies 7, 14 and 28.  We also read two case studies (#1 and #2) from Michael Power's A Designer's Log:  Case Studies in Instructional Design.  In addition we read Behaviourism, Cognitivism, Constructivism:  Comparing Critical Features from an Instructional Design Perspective written by P. A. Ertmer and T. J. Newby.

My group was the lead group this week.  This meant that we had to design a presentation to the rest of our class on the assigned readings.  The  group (Katie Lauritsen, Garrett Christen, Kristyn Degi, Gene Tognetti and myself) made a Google presentation and came up with four questions with which to lead the week's discussion.  We each posted one question but lead the discussions in all question areas.  Below is a link to both the Google presentation and the questions to the class.

Link to Google presentation

Discussion Questions

I learned so much this week about Instructional Design.  The reading from Chapter 2 covered the topic of needs (the problems, challenges and opportunities) and the steps needs for total understanding.  Knowing the stakeholders and their expectations and everyone roles and responsibility is vital to the design process.  I also learned the definition of a SME (subject matter expert) and their importance to the process. Finally, understanding the problem was discussed.  The designer must get the learner from "what is" to "what should be".  Different avenues of collecting this data were shown.

Chapter 2 talked about the learner and the importance of not assuming things about the learner.  It is important to collect data about the learner so as to be able to get to as many learners as possible.  It discusses how to analyze the learner and how the different learning characteristics can influence any design.

Instructional Design Project

This week we had to chose a topic for our Instructional Design Project. We had to come up with our goal statement and audience description for our project.  Although, the assignment only took a few minutes, it was a long process to try and find the topic of the project.

Below is a link to my Instructional Goal and Audience Description.

One of the most important aspects to ID is evaluating and re-evaluating.  I received some very productive feedback from my instructor and have decided to narrow down my topic.

The new topic is Upon completion of this 2 - 3 hour online tutorial, teachers will be able to use the Learning Content Management System (LCMS) called D2L to edit, manage and deliver an already created online course.