Description: Clearly and concisely describe the purpose of your digital learning resource.
The main problem to be addressed is that instructors need to be able to efficiently determine what learning technology tools will best suit their instructional activities delivered online.
Learning Goals: Clearly describe your intended learning goals for the digital learning resource.
The learning goals or learning outcomes for this digital learning resource are:
- develop the instructional activity online
- understand the pros and cons of the choice in learning technology
- evaluate the choice in learning technology based on the updated Bates SECTIONS criteria (2015)
Intended Audience: Identify the intended audience for your digital learning resource.
The intended audience for this digital learning resource is instructors who want to be able to determine what learning technology tools will best suit their instructional activities delivered online.
Rationale: Explain how you think the digital resource will meet the needs of the intended audience.
This resource will allow instructors to choose learning technology tools to use in delivering an instructional activity online. The resource will give a description of the tool, a video, a pros and cons list, and a SECTIONS analysis. The description will allow instructors to quickly understand whether the tool has any chance of fitting their needs, quickly rejecting ones that do not. The video will further demonstrate whether the tool fits their needs by showing how the tool works. The pros and cons list will allow instructors to better contrast this tool with other tools. The SECTIONS analysis allows instructors to gain a deeper understanding as to the educational effectiveness of this tool. All of these will be very concise, allowing instructors to quickly decide what resource will be best for their instructional activities.
Tools: Provide a summary of the tools that you will use to develop your digital learning resource and clearly justify why you would like to use them.
This digital learning resource will use a combination of text, video, a forum, and a quiz. These components will be hosted in a learning management course shell. Looking to the updated Bates SECTIONS model, this solution will address many of the points.
- Students will be able to access this solution on a wide range of devices.
- Easy to use by all
- Cost will be essentially free
- Teaching or pedagogical value will be significant
- Interaction and/or collaboration between students will be promoted by the use of a forum where students (instructors) can discuss solutions
- Organizational support needed is modest
- Networking beyond the course for students will be promoted by suggesting Twitter hashtags to start learning technology conversations with.
- Security and privacy of students will be respected by making this a private digital learning resource. Personal information will be stored in Canada at the organization, and communication beyond the confines of the digital learning resource will be optional.
Assessment Plan: Describe any assessment and/or evaluation methods that you will use to ensure the audience has achieved the intended learning goals.
An online quiz will allow users to self-assess that they achieved the learning outcomes.
Learning Theories & Instructional Design Principles Used: Identify the specific learning theories and instructional design principles that will be used in the creation of your digital learning resource and include an explanation of how the theories and principles will inform the design of your digital learning resource.
The main learning theory used here is constructivism, which “equates learning with creating meaning from experience” (Ertmer, 2013, p. 55). Instructors will construct their own meaning, relative to their context, which will be different for each instructor. The design of the digital learning resource will provide information that is relevant to the context of most instructors, allowing it to be an efficient learning resource.
Instructions for Use and Plan for Use: Describe how the digital learning resource will be used. If it is an open resource, how will you share it publicly, and if it is not an open resource, why not, and how it will be shared/used in context etc.
For the purpose of this assignment, the digital learning resource will be a learning management system course shell that users need to be manually added to. This will allow assessment, student-student and student-instructor interaction, and privacy. Users will read content, watch videos, optionally choose to interact with other students or the instructor in forums, and optionally choose to network with users beyond the confines of the course by using Twitter. Users may be able to assess their understanding of the content by completing online quizzes.
For the authentic use of this digital learning resource outside of the confines of this assignment, it will be made public on a website without assessment or student-student and student-instructor interaction.
References
Bates, A. W. (2015). Chapters 8. In Teaching in a digital age: Guidelines for designing teaching and learning. Vancouver BC: Tony Bates Associates Ltd. Retrieved from https://opentextbc.ca/teachinginadigitalage/part/9-pedagogical-differences-between-media/
Ertmer, P. A., & Newby, T. J. (2013). Behaviorism, cognitivism, constructivism: Comparing critical features from an instructional design perspective. Performance Improvement Quarterly, 26(2), 43-71.
Hi Jason,
I like how you identified a need that could provide immense efficiencies for instructors who likely specialize in topics and content outside of pedagogy. They should focus on their specialty and not spend so much time trying to sort out which programs and resources would best work for them in a teaching setting.
What if the resource was able to work for other universities or academic institutions as the problem doesn’t seem isolated to one school specifically? Could this benefit others? Would the criteria you would consider support private industry as well? For example, a corporate trainer looking to train their staff on a new loyalty program rollout, could they leverage this activity to help identify what resources would best support their training delivery?
I wish there was more information related to examining the needs of the learner in terms of their skill set with learning technology. What if an instructor does not have the skills to use the tool they are being recommended?
Do you think an assessment is necessary for a tool like this?
I look forward to seeing your end result, this sounds like a great resource in the making!
Hi Katie,
Some of what I create for this assignment will likely end up being put into the RRU knowledge base, which is public, so other universities can use it. I’m also starting to add Creative Commons licensing to some of the RRU articles, making it easier for others to make use of them. I found out recently that another BC institution was using some of the documentation I had created, which was great to hear.
The content should work for instructors in private or public. For this course I’ll probably just address a few common instructional techniques and hope to expand on it later.
Part of the Bates SECTIONS model is ease of use, which I think is really important. Tools should be easy to use for both the students and the instructor.
The information provided to instructors should be enough for them to decide whether they’ll be able to handle the intended activity in an online format. Sometimes instructors realize that what they want to do is more complicated than they thought and they change the activity.
Assessment is not necessary for this tool. It will be added since it’s listed in the rubric as a requirement and will be removed when it’s used in the real world.
Thanks for your comments!
Hi Jason, looks like this will be a very useful tool for instructors to use. I’m sure for instructors who may be newer to teaching online, they will be very glad to have such a resource as teaching online has different dynamics from teaching in a face-to-face classroom. The pro and con list should make decision-making easier along with the other aspects, really emphasizing the ease of use concept. I’m thinking going on the constructivist direction, could instructors add to the resource and make it an organic resource like a Wiki? As technology changes and updates, new material will need to be formed. The users (i.e., instructors) would have valuable insights which they could provide. The forums could be a good space to lay out ideas to be formalized by an administrator into the resource. Just a thought. Cheers.
Hi George,
There are currently no plans to make it a wiki that instructors will be able to edit.
In my experience individual instructors often have strong feelings about whether a tool is good or bad based on their own past experience, preferences, and needs. I think it’s better to have people update the content who work with many instructors and therefore understand instructors’ needs as a whole while also having a deeper understanding of the technology. Understanding instructors’ needs as a whole allows the recommendation of tools that will work well for as many instructors as possible. A deeper understanding of technology allows better recommendations based on whether the tool works on all commonly used platforms, is accessible, does not have privacy or security concerns, is not based on technology being phased out (e.g., Flash), etc.. I’ve seen cases where an instructor really liked a program just because he or she was familiar with it and had been using it for years, even though it’s objectively poor compared to alternatives. I find that people, especially those who are less tech savvy, can get comfortable with outdated software and complain about other or new software just because it’s different. It’s also my experience that if content is opened to editing by users that extremely few will contribute, so opening a wiki up to 50 instructors may actually yield zero contributions. There may also be added complexities in setting up a wiki that allows only the instructors to edit and not everyone in the world.
On the flip side, instructors could easily recommend changes to the content. Instructors will be working with staff who are able to change the content. The content pages may include a “click here to provide feedback on this article” type of form, allowing instructors to easily provide feedback, possibly resulting in improvements to the content. I think making it easy for users to provide feedback is important, as users will have good ideas, and may be the first ones to spot when content is out of date.
Thanks for your feedback!
Hey Jason!
This is a great idea. You’re right, too; people get used to technology and have a hard time understanding that it’s been upgraded and the reasons upgrades were necessary isn’t going to be obvious to applied-users.
I’m a little curious about the division of roles for online instructors. The instructors are completely separate from development in the RCN. There are SMEs, and we get input when creating modules/quizzes, etc., but, they don’t develop or use tools. If they suddenly wanted something like a quiz or a tool in the course they instruct online, we’d need them to fill out a proposal, submit it, we’d conduct an assessment, and if we chose to do it, we’d develop it ourselves. In that sense, they’d help with content, but they don’t touch development software or anything. So I suppose I’m just curious, where the line between ID/instructor/developers are for RRU?
Hi Krista,
At RRU, instructional designers (IDs) and senior learning technologists (SLTs) work with subject matter experts (SMEs) to develop courses. IDs and SLTs work in the Centre for Teaching and Educational Technologies (CTET), so I’ll just refer to them collectively as CTET. SMEs facilitate the courses they develop roughly 80% of the time, so most of the time the SME is the instructor.
Courses are “owned” by the programs, so the programs and instructors/SMEs are ultimately responsible for course quality, not CTET. CTET supports course development and live courses by supporting the instructors.
Instructors in live courses have a lot of freedom to make changes, with any oversight coming from the programs. CTET may give guidance and make suggestions, but decisions are made the instructors. The justification for doing things this way is academic freedom for the instructors.
Many of the instructors at RRU are industry experts in their fields, not usually teachers. They tend to bring with them a lot of knowledge on the subjects they teach, so I think the concept of academic freedom may be more important here than it is at other educational institutions.
Going off on a bit of a tangent here, but I wonder if it’s accurate to say that an instructor in an RRU-style online course teaches? Are we taught by our instructors in MALAT courses or do they facilitate learning environments where we teach ourselves?