A Brief Overview of Instructional Design

The Final Assignment for ED626 Instructional Design

Instructor: Denvy Saxowsky

by Denvy Saxowsky

March 10, 2008

A Brief Overview of Instructional Design

Goal:

To offer future college instructors and professors a brief summary of the process of designing effective instruction.

Task:

While professors at institutions of higher education typically are very knowledgeable in their field or specialty, and have earned a doctoral degree in that field, they typically don't take any courses or training in preparing for teaching. While lecturing, labs, field trips, study groups, exercises, tests and papers are valuable tools, they may not be used as effectively as they could. As a result students and instructors are not using their resources, their time and money effectively.

The university feels that introducing doctoral candidates to the concept of instructional design will benefit the future instructors, their students and the institutions for which they will be teaching. Training after the fact may seem like a logical solution to the problem, but faculty typically do not have extra time that they wish to give to their job nor are they interested in improving their teaching skills because they know their material and what more is necessary. Faculty already teaching at the university will be invited and encouraged to participate as well.

The task will be to create a three-hour seminar to be offered on Tuesday afternoons in place of classes that afternoon. To allow maximum participation this lesson will be available every Tuesday for ten weeks during the term with a maximum of thirty participants in any one session.

Audience:

The university has identified two distinct groups of individuals who will participate in this lesson: doctoral candidate who will typically teach at an institution of higher education or other place of employment, and faculty already teaching at the university. In general, neither group is inclined to be motivated to take such as course. One may therefore expect that the audience is not self-motivated to attend. The university has either made it a requirement of the doctoral programs or as requirement for continued employment or promotion.

As doctoral candidates and instructors at an American university, one can expect that their English skills are very good. One can also expect that there will be students from all around the world of different cultures and language backgrounds. Communications skills for writing, reading, listening, and speaking may vary greatly. Backgrounds of culture may also vary greatly particularly among doctoral candidates whose actual experiences in America may be limited. Comments relative to the American culture and English idioms may not be meaningful in all cultures.

The audience will be quite varied in their interests ranging from politics to mathematics, from physics to education, from language to business, from music to sports. The audience will have varied skill levels regarding the use of computers and technology, although all will be able to use a word processing program, probably in PC's more than on Macs; all will have used the Internet and all will have used email. Some will have extensive computer skills and other will have used most common computer programs such as Powerpoint and Excel.

The audience as all very educated but will span a broad range of ages. Their questions may be very challenging and perhaps controversial. They will typically engage easily in discussion as they have done this as instructors already or they have been involved as students. All will have opinions about how to teach because they either have been dong it for some time or they have observed their instructors in the past thinking that some day they too would teach. All of them can and will come to the class with some experiences they will want to share. While some will be very open to new ideas, others will see no reason to be there and talk about things that are old.

All will be involved because the lesson affects their job and career.

Objectives:[2]

The purpose of this lesson is to expose the audience to most basic tools for delivering educational material to potential learners as effectively as possible. Modeling this process will be key in the delivery of this material.

While exposure to the materials is paramount in this lesson, delivering the materials to excite the audience to use the tools is also paramount. This will require engaging the audience in the most effective way. While lecturing allows for the delivery of the greatest amount of information, it may not be best for remembering or utilizing the information. Activities that allow greater understanding and retention also require more time and time is limited.

At the end of the lesson, the student will

• implement a working model for designing effective instruction

• evaluate activities relative to learning styles

• describe characteristics relevant to analyzing one's audience

• formulate effective objectives based on the task analysis

• create teaching units based on the objectives while reflecting the task and audience

• develop assessment tools to evaluate the learners' gains

• evaluate the overall effectiveness of their teaching.

All objectives are intended to move the learners through the remembering and understanding information so they can apply the tools in their own settings and evaluate their effectiveness.

Unit Outline: (this is a sample unit outline that does not match the objectives)

1^st day – Class period of 45 minutes

Read Rumble Tumble from FEMA website

Talk about earthquakes – students discuss what they know and don’t know.

Have students write down their fears about earthquakes, then break into small groups to compile a list of common fears.

Students prepare their list using a word processor and print out onto a transparency, then present to the class.

Close the lesson by explaining that teacher will compile the lists from each group and tomorrow the groups will begin research.

2^nd day – Class period of 45 minutes

Teacher shows prepared graphic organizer to the students representing the compiled list of common earthquake fears

Teacher explains that each group will have a fear or question based on the fear to research during class time. Since the class is learning about Power Point, each student group will put together a page of the presentation based on answering their question.

Students groups are given a website to explore (with guided questions) to research if the fears ever happen and if they can be avoided and a geologist or other California classroom to email with questions.

3^rd day – Class period of 45 minutes

Teacher will conduct a simple lesson on how to put information into a Power Point slide, showing some basic information about how to use the program. Students then use

their research findings to prepare a page of a Power Point presentation.

Email is checked to see if any responses have been made.

4^th day - Class period of 45 minutes

Class Power Point presentations are made and any email responses shared. Class discussion about what was found out about earthquake damage and how to look for hazards.

Student groups are given digital cameras to go to selected spots in the school and/or classroom to document potential hazards – this should take about 15 minutes.

With teacher help, students upload the pictures on to the computer to share with rest of class. Homework is assigned for students to think of ways to mitigate the hazards, returning with ideas to present in their groups.

Websites are given; books and pamphlets are available in the classroom for students to take home to complete homework.

5^th day – Class period of 45 minutes

Students meet in groups to go over ideas for earthquake safety, choosing which ones they want to put together on a poster to put up in the school hallways. Time is given for students to use art supplies as well as clipart, pictures from the internet, and computer drawing tools to add to their posters.

When posters are completed, groups choose a pre-selected site to place the finished posters.

Materials and supplies:

Powerpoint will be used for portions of the lesson. This will require a room with a computer and projector. The Powerpoint presentations will be prepared before the lesson, burned onto a CD and stored on a flash drive to help assure that the Powerpoint will work as expected. The equipment will be reviewed before preparing the Powerpoint to assure that the versions of Powerpoint are compatible.

If possible a room with table and chairs allowing for small group discussions will be secured. Lighting and sound will be checked before the class.

Handouts for several portions of the lesson will be prepared before class and an adequate number of copies will be made, and organized to be readily available at the appropriate time. An overhead projector will be necessary to project the handouts as they are being discussed.

Blank paper and pencils or pens will be placed on all tables for the students to participate in activities and take notes.

Evaluation:

The following rubric will be used for score the students' performance. The goal is that each student will achieve the "Accomplished" level, while extraordinary student have the potential to expand them skills and talents to a higher "Exemplary" level. Students not reaching the "Accomplished" level will be supported with additional work from the instructor and other students.

Skill	Beginning 1	Developing 2	Accomplished 3	Exemplary 4
v Instruction v
Setting Goal/ Purpose	Project lacks goal or purpose	Goal or purpose is vague	Goal/purpose is clear but lacks consistency	Goal is well-defined, clear and evident throughout the project
Assessing Needs & Skills	Minimum accounting for needs or skills	Skills to be used and needs to attain the goal are incomplete	Plan identifies needs and skills of most learners	Plan clearly identifies needs and skills of learners
Identifying Audience	Minimum consideration given learners	Some thought given to the learners' characteristics i.e. age	Consideration is given to most of the learners' characteristics	Learners' demographics clearly and completely identified and stated
Setting Objectives	Objectives are weak or missing	Objectives are discussed but inconsistent or vague	Objectives are good but not exceptional	Objectives are appropriate in number, clearly defined, achievable and measurable
Assessment Tools	Tools are vague to incomplete	Tools are defined but vague and benchmarks are questionable	Tools are clear with some benchmarks	Tools are concise, understandable, consistent with goals and include benchmarks
Strategies & Materials	Method of instruction appears haphazard	Method of instruction is random and some appropriate materials are missing	Method of instruction and materials are defined but not exceptional	Methods for instruction or guiding learning are clearly defined and appropriate materials are used
Evaluation	No evaluation of process considered	Some thought was given to "how things went"	A clear desire to evaluate is present but the tool is poorly defined	An evaluation tool for appraising the success of the instruction is well defined
v Design v
Text/ Font	A excessive use of font variations	Fonts are mostly consistent and easy to read	Fonts are consistent, easy to read and vary appropriately	Fonts are consistent, easy to read and vary appropriately with good eye appeal
Copyright/ Contacts	No information about the sources of material or authorship is given	Fair use guidelines and appropriate permission infrequently used or stated; contact information marginal	Fair use guidelines and appropriate permission used and stated most of the time; contact information available	Fair use guidelines are used, permission is stated on copyrighted materials, contact information is clearly stated
Interest/ Games/Fun	Project is boring	Information is present but not inviting or presented in an interesting manner; games are missing, unrelated or distracting	Information is present and rather interesting; fun items can distract as well as lead to learning	Project is interesting, inviting; and uses games and fun to affect learning and not serve as a distraction
Professional	There are many spelling and grammatical errors	There are several spelling and grammatical errors	There are few spelling and grammatical errors	There are no spelling or grammatical errors

Summative Evaluation:

As the class is coming to an end, the students will be given an evaluation asking if what benefits they received from the session, and what suggestions they might have to improve the class. The instructor will also follow up with informal interview type conversations with some of the students either through email or phone calls.

After several weeks, students of this class and students of these professors will be contacted to see if they found any differences in the way the professors have been teaching. Administrators and supervisors will also be contacted at that time to see if they have noticed a difference.

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