Month: July 2018

• Description: The purpose of my digital learning resource is to make the process of online learning more simple and convenient for nomadic workers by allowing them to complete quizzes digitally instead of printing them out on paper then scanning or faxing them back to the organization’s office.
• Learning Goals: Learning goals will be considered accomplished when safety training quizzes have passing grades and meet legislative requirements.
• Intended Audience: Transient contract trades workers.
• Rationale: This resource should meet the needs of the intended audience by making it far more convenient for them to complete their mandatory training online.
• Tools: A few of my peers have suggested I use Google Forms to create online quizzes. This tool is appealing because it is free and appears to be fairly versatile. Once I arrive at the prototype stage, I may try other similar tools if this one does not meet stakeholder needs.
• Assessment Plan: The quizzes will be automatically graded to ensure learners pass and meet legislative standards.
• Learning Theories & Instructional Design Principles Used: Adult Learning Theory and Mobile Learning Theory will guide this project. Kelly (2006) explains how adult learners “expect more from their educational sessions because their time is valuable” (para. 28) and they “have other roles that counterbalance the significance of their role as a learner” (para. 28). Mobile devices are ubiquitous and they present many learning opportunities (Sharples, Taylor, & Vavoula, 2005), and workers who travel around following jobs tend to have smartphones with good data plans which gives us an opportunity to make learning more accessible for them. This project will also be supported with the assistance of some design principles: listen to user-feedback; facilitate user-friendliness to be respectful of the busy-adult-learners’ time; plan for future users as well as current users; and always be open to evolution and improvement.
• Instructions for Use: Learners will receive the link to the digital safety training and electronic quiz in an email-based orientation package. They will complete the quiz and hit a “submit” button which will forward their results to the organization’s admin.
• Plan for Use: This resource will not be open because the safety training is for specific jobs within a particular company, not for learning about something like photography which might be of larger interest to the general public. This resource will only be used to demonstrate learning by one organization’s workers for certain temporary jobs.

I am open to feedback from peers, especially if anyone can suggest cheap or free tools for electronic documents or applications which can embed submittable quizzes into online learning materials. I’m going to start by trying Google Forms but am open to other options if anyone has found something better.

References

Sharples, M., Taylor, J., & Vavoula, G. (2005, October). Towards a theory of mobile learning. In Proceedings of mLearn (Vol. 1, No. 1, pp. 1-9).

There is a lovely plethora of frameworks in existence which were all masterminded to help folks (such as teachers and instructional designers) in their undertaking to integrate technologies for learning. I selected the SECTIONS framework to assist moi (see Bates 2015 for more details). 

What are the affordances and limitations of the framework? Succinct frameworks with shorter acronyms might be simpler to remember, but the SECTIONS framework – with it’s many sections – digs deep, making it a very thorough tool for facilitating successful educational-media integration. One limitation for me is that I would need to refer to my notes for remembering what each letter represents until I used this framework enough that the associated meanings would calcify in the longer-term storage facility located in my skull.

How well does the framework align to your existing educational and pedagogical practices? The SECTIONS framework offers plenty of angles for conscientious planning of tech-adoption. One could adapt it to suit multiple scenarios by thinking of it as a SECTIONS buffet. For example, the Networking section does not apply to my straightforward behaviourist safety-training scenario, so I will simply walk past that dish and fill my plate with more pertinent delectables. 

How did the application of the framework impact your decision-making process? It allowed me to broadly skim my problem from many angles, thus helping me to purposefully zero in on what is most important. Without it, I may have been handicapped by my own narrow focus on one aspect of the challenge, obliviously bypassing something else which may have been an essential element. At it’s worst, this may have caused unbearable shame, followed by a lifetime of regret and self-loathing. 

Which components of the framework did you find most valuable to your decision-making process? Why? I found the components of Students, Ease of use, and Costs to be the most relevant for my operation. Empathizing with stakeholders in the early stages of the design thinking process unleashed the essential needs which correspond to these quintessential categories.

The eight habits of highly-effective decision-making for choosing and using learning technologies are as follows:

Students

Ease of use

Costs

Teaching functions

Interaction

Organisational issues

Networking

Security and privacy

 

References

Bates, A. W. (2015). Chapters 6-8. In Teaching in a digital age: Guidelines for designing teaching and learning. Vancouver BC: Tony Bates Associates Ltd.