Month: August 2018

Upon completing my prototype and testing the digital learning resource, I felt a great sense of satisfaction that I had created something that could potentially be useful for both students and staff. The design thinking process allowed me to get into the mind of the user and create from their perspective. I am still surprised by what you can learn by just speaking with students and learning basically how they learn. The way people learn has been changing for thousands of years. Bates (2015) describes how the earliest form of teaching took the form of oral communication which evolved to written communication and eventually audio and video. All these forms are still used today, but newer technologies are appearing in classrooms. Social media is just one example of a new form. It should not have come as a surprise to me that many of the learners in my target audience were using their smartphones to access course content, but without initiating interviews, I would never have found this out.

My digital learning resource, instructional videos for introducing D2L (the learning management system at my school board) was evaluated as clear and being appropriate for the target audience. I am very happy with this assessment as during the IDEATE phase, I noted that in using the SECTIONS model (Bates, 2015) students would be the most important element of consideration. I took care in making sure that the speed of the video would not be too quick, language not too complicated, and not covering too many topics to be unnecessarily long due to cognitive concerns.

Of course there are also many areas for improvement. Accessibility in the form of captions was on my radar to begin with, but definitely something that was pointed out and should be incorporated. An interactive element was also suggested to allow the learner to try out what they just viewed; a split screen was suggested or some form of an application quiz. If I can get these elements incorporated, then it be something I would definitely like to test out.

Design thinking has now been explored in a couple of courses, but it is always nice to be able to try out a method in a real world working example. User considerations will definitely be at the forefront of any project that I am working on and design thinking with be a method that I will gladly share with peers. Thank you to all those who provided feedback on my resource. Your comments are greatly appreciated and will definitely inform my next iteration.

 

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.

As our digital learning resources are now undergoing the Test Phase, we now turn our attention to the criteria in which these resources are evaluated and assessed. With the wide range of resources that are available from course modules, videos, presentations, guides, etc., I was thinking it would be very difficult to come up with an evaluation instrument that could cover various resources and tools. Some resources are more interactive than others. Some tools are meant to be more for reference than for new learning. The most important aspect from what I found working through my own resource in addition to exposing myself to others, is determining what the learning goals are. Without knowing the goal of the creator, one cannot determine whether the learning resource achieves success in what it was originally intended to be for.

One of the tools that I have looked at is the Learning Object Review Instrument (LORI), which has learning goal alignment as one of items for evaluation (Leacock & Nesbit, 2007). The other eight are content quality, feedback and adaptation, motivation, presentation design, interaction usability, accessibility, reusability, and standards compliance. Most of these criterion can be applied to almost any digital learning resource which makes the LORI tool attractive in my eyes. There needs to be certain flexibility after determining the learning goals in how each item is reflected in the resource. Keeping in mind this flexibility, most people can at least agree a resource should have good content, motivate students and be accessible among other factors.

Hadjerrouit (2010) notes that in evaluating web-based learning resources one must consider the technology, pedagogy, and content. LORI hits these three elements through the nine items outlined above (e.g., accessibility for technology, motivation for pedagogy, content quality for content, etc.). I believe an evaluator would have a much easier time working with nine elements versus three broader categories. Of course, adaptability could be limited when working with more rigid items, but that goes back to my earlier statement on determining the learning goals early on and seeing how these items fit into those intentions.

Due to the nature of LORI being in-depth enough for proper analysis by covering core components, but yet not overbearing in the effort and time needed to complete (Leacock & Nesbit, 2007), in my opinion it is a good option for evaluating digital learning resources which I shall explore using in the future.

 

References

Hadjerrouit, S. (2010). A conceptual framework for using and evaluating web-based learning resources in school education. Journal of Information Technology Education, 9, 53-79.

Leacock, T. L., & Nesbit, J. C. (2007). A framework for evaluating the quality of multimedia learning resources. Educational Technology & Society, 10(2) 44-59.