Christina Hains

Plus and Minuses of Distance Learning

2008-11-18T20:07:00.000-08:00

A Friends Question:
"I have another favor to ask. I think you should have never told me about this option for a masters program, because now you are my sme and I am going to hit you up for your thoughts. SO I was hoping that you would give me your opinion of plus and minuses of Distance learning from an instructional designers point of view? This is for a presentation in 2 weeks so don't feel like you need to get it to me tomorrow. Thank you so much for your help."

My Response
Plus: Distance education is a tool that when used effectively has great potential. When used with sound instructional design methods, distance learning can effectively bring knowledge to people in remote locations and difficult personal situations that have various time or location constraints (full-time job, parenting, bed rest, OCD, leprosy, etc.). In addition, with distance learning schools can increase the capacity of students they are able to serve. Thomas L. Russell has well documented data that proves there is no significant difference in student outcomes between alternative modes of education delivery and traditional modes. So if the same results are found while spending less money all while making it available to a broader number of students, I don't see a reason to not use such a tool.

Minus: Distance Edu. is a tool. When a tool is used badly, there are bad results. Because putting things on-line or making a packet is so easy to do, there are many non-examples of distance learning. A professor/teacher can usually get by on the information they've spent their life gathering and their whit & charm. When you put the same professors class on-line there are often problems. Most classes are not instructionally sound all by themselves but the professor makes them fly because (if they are good) they can add their own personality and liven things up. There is no one to do that at a distance. The content has to be arranged in a way that is self motivating and generates the learners excitement & personality independent of a local cheer leader.

The real problem is that most instruction is simply a journey of trivial pursuit. A class should have analysis, discussion, problem solving; these are the types of things that will generate engaged learners, regardless of the professors personality or the mode of delivery. Distance education will only see the results Dr. Russell found when instructionally sound and engaging material is presented.

What does an instructional designer do?

2008-11-04T20:10:00.000-08:00

Friends Question:
"So I have a favor to ask of you. In one of my classes we are supposed to keep a running blog on instructional design. One of the major questions he wants us to answer is how we would describe to friends and family what an instructional designer does. Would you be willing to answer that question and I would anonymously post your response on my blog? "

My Response
Over the last hundred years we have seen a dramatic evolution in technology around us, yet in many ways we have not been able to practically apply our scientific knowledge of learning into instruction; therefore, instruction and our education process has remained pretty much the same. Instructional Design tries to bring instruction into the 21st century. By studying the science behind teaching and learning, Instructional Design tries to improve teaching and learning by identifying sound teaching strategies and incorporating technology when it can enhance learning.

The majority of Instructional Designers work either in academia or the corporate world. I worked at a university's center for teaching and learning. In this job I worked with faculty to help design courses or improve the teaching and learning in current courses. I would mostly do this by providing research-based evidence that a certain aspect of learning was more effective; I would give suggestions to the faculty one-on-one or in small groups, and then let them make their final decision regarding the implementation of the information I presented. Sometimes I would coordinate lectures or trainings for faculty to access the same information in a more traditional way.

Many faculty, because their name is followed by three special letters, figure they already know everything an instructional designer could tell them. At our university, the center for teaching and learning is able to interact with around 20% of our faculty members; in bigger Universities like Florida State and BYU, the centers for teaching and learning have around a 10% faculty interaction rate. This interaction involves faculty that meet with instructional designers individually as well as any that attend a lecture or training on topics regarding teaching and learning.

Because of the resistance many Ph.D.s have to someone critiquing them and giving them advice, instructional design work in education, ironically enough, is sometimes less progressive than in a corporate setting.

IDD 315 Sketch

2008-06-03T13:53:00.000-07:00

The past year I have been teaching IDD 315 (Introduction to Principles of Instructional Design) at BYU-Hawaii. I’ve been working with Dr. M. David Merrill to make this course task-centered, peer-interactive, technology enhanced. We’ve developed some pretty interesting things so I thought I would share.

IDD 315 is a class designed to teach the principles of instructional design. Being such, it is important the class itself be an example of effective design. Dr. M. David Merrill’s task-centered instructional strategies serve as the backbone for the instruction being created for this course.

The class is designed around a number of tasks that increase in complexity and depth as the semester unfolds. This task-centered approach is based on the study that mental-models provide a more sustainable form of memory. A mental model is a set of related ideas—a holistic representation of the parts, relationships, conditions, actions and consequences of a complete problem or task (Jonassen).

The students are introduced to their first mental-model when I demonstrate the analysis of a piece of instruction. The students then analyze another piece of instruction similar to the one I demonstrated. For example one of the first articles the students read is Merrill’s First Principles of Instruction. Before the students read the article I showed the students a piece of instruction identifying its elements of activation, demonstration, application, and integration. I briefly explained each the four aspects of first principles during the demonstration and drew on the student’s natural instincts to develop amendments to the instruction that would improve it.

After class, the students read First Principles of Instruction and critique another piece of instruction. By demonstrating the task first, the students were given exposure to the content in a meaningful way, they knew what they would be expected to do with the content they would read, and were able to see the real world applicability of the information. After reading the article students were immediately able to apply the knowledge in an activity, solidifying the knowledge into a mental-model.

Another important facet to the class is that it’s peer-interactive. Peer sharing, peer collaboration and peer critique require learners to test their mental models, to refine their mental models, and to share their ideas. These activities create flexible mental models, facilitate learners’ ability to apply their knowledge in new situations, and provide opportunities for learners to work together as they will be required to do in the workplace following their education (Strobel & Tillberg-Webb). Therefore, Following the students attempt to complete the given task, students post their assignment on blackboard for all to see and in groups of three to five, compare each others critique.

In groups each person has to defend his or her analysis and explain why they made the decisions they made. By sharing, the groups understanding of the task is broadened, their opportunity to review the content reviewed, and their perspective of analysis refined. The group takes the best aspects of each persons’ work and together submit another analysis. Because everything is posted for everyone to see, I am able to give feedback to individuals or groups at any point along the way.

Throughout the course, we go through three classes of tasks. The first class being centered around First Principles of Instruction, the second centered around Levels of Instructional Strategies , the third centered around task-centered instruction.

The tasks very, but the format stays the same. The students observes a task, are exposed to the topic components specific to the task, they solve the problem, post their response, meet in a group and compares responses with each other.

testing, 1,2, 3, testing - 4/14/2007

2007-04-14T19:17:00.000-07:00

I have not thought to post the address to show off my site. It is http://stu-inst.usu.edu/~cfelt/money

I was able to test the site out this week and found a few areas that I will change. The students use computers with 10-inch screens. With this different screen size, the menu on the budget page needs to be moved down, as is it covers up the needs/wants link. The wording on the final test for question number 5 needs to be redone. I decided the discussion board link on the first page should go directly to the discussion board where as in the lesson, there is an introductory page to let the students know what they need to do. The students who were going to the discussion board from the first page, already knew what they needed to do, they were just coming back to finish or check out other peoples posts. Also, I found a few more glitches that I didn’t catch with compatibility between Explorer and the HTML I coded.

up and running - 4/6/2007

2007-04-06T11:31:00.000-07:00

This week was spent putting the second lesson into html code and getting it on the web. Although I had a lot of the formatting done from lesson 1, it took a good deal of time. Luckily, I had spring break this week and was able to commit an aberrant amount of time to the project.

After getting it all coded I begin html syntax checks through all the html. There were many errors that I needed to go back and fix individual. This also proved to be a lengthy process. But I feel good at this point, the project is mostly done and I have three weeks to evaluate the end product and make changes to it.

budgeting - 3/30/2007

2007-03-30T11:22:00.000-07:00

The site is coming along. I had a great idea today for the budget page. I decided I would give the students choices as to their stage in life (or imaginary stage in life) and make there budget and expense options based on their stage in life.
So, I have single, single with child, couple, and couple with child. The student picks one of these areas and is given a living situation and expenses, They have to decide how much they will spend in each area: savings, housing, food, transportation, entertainment, personal care, and miscellaneous.

I designed the budget page so the student wouldn’t have enough money to get the high end options on all of categories. The students have to choose two areas that are important to them and kind of skimp on everything else. I like this because budgeting is all about making decisions on what is most important to the individual.

crossword puzzle - 3/23/2007

2007-03-23T18:55:00.000-07:00

I am very pleased with my most recent addition to the site. In my design I implemented some games for the students to play that would reinforce some of the things they were learning on the site. I thought I might be able to use JavaScript to make some game for this electronic based medium. I did not, however, know how to do this.

I have been searching for a few days to find a script and hopefully learn how to edit it to make my own crossword puzzle. Well, I am please to say that I was able to do just that. It took a great deal of effort; I have never had JavaScript training of any kind. It was very much a “let’s see what this does” type method. But I feel a great deal of accomplishment having created it—even though it only accounts for one small page on my site.

ready, aim, fire - 3/16/2007

2007-03-16T17:16:00.001-07:00

I feel that I have designed well and conducted sufficient user analysis to tweak my design as needed and I am ready to fire away, i.e. code it all and get it on the site. I realized this week that we have 35 more days until the project is due. SO, it’s time to implement all my theories and test them again.

user analysis - 3/10/2007

2007-03-10T17:14:00.000-08:00

I have been conducting user analysis on my design, trying to find the most effective and interesting way to present this information. I thought it would be easy for my students to get excited about money, but managing money is something that is a little far removed for them to grasp fully. I have designed games and word searches to practice the content. The students have been more receptive to the games but still aren’t ecstatic about learning to budget there money.

While trying to make the instruction more teen-friendly I found some really great resources for educators from University of California Cooperative Extensions (UCCE).

back - 3/1/2007

2007-03-01T15:03:00.000-08:00

So I am back… my hard drive died. I spent a week getting it fixed and then another week getting everything back where it was to begin with. It’s been an ugly process. But while I was waiting for the HD to get fixed I spent a lot of time at school figuring out my portfolio. http://stu-inst.usu.edu/~cfelt/portfolio/portfolio.html

I also spent a good amount of time designing the three other money lessons and implementing the usability study done last semester to improve the original site. In addition to the usability study, I received feedback from my peers that has helped me identify areas of improvement.

index - 2/10/2007

2007-02-11T12:28:00.000-08:00

To help me design the new instruction created the framework for the site this week. I hand the change to do some peer reviews that gave me some good ideas and warned me of things I didn’t want to do. So since it was fresh on my mind, I wanted to establish an index for the site where the user could access both the simple and more complex lessons. I needed some sort of home base for the two. I finished this just before my hard drive started grinding again. I had to shut it all down Friday and have been able to get her to work ever since. I am afraid it will need to be replaced this time. But at least this time I am backed up.

I also am having to transfer everthing to a new server. The new address for the project will be at http://stu-inst.usu.edu/~cfelt/money/index.html. This transfer will take a little bit of re-coding for the pages with validating forms or messages of any kind.

social learning - 2/2/07

2007-02-03T18:17:00.000-08:00

As I have been conducting learner and content analyses I have been considering the importance of social learning. I have decided that one way I can make this next section more engaging is to include dicussions. I am not sure at this point how I am going to achieve that. I will try a few different sites that have threaded discussion options and see which one does what I want it do. I think that the higher level skills that the students will be dealing with in this second section are more subjective and should be discussed by the students.

student response - 1/27/2007

2007-01-27T14:06:00.000-08:00

This week I was able to get some feedback about student content knowledge by having them create a budget. I gave them a paper-based prototype of the content I would like to present digitally. I did this to identify areas in which I would have to make a concerted effort to instruct and which areas students were comfortable with. They were given an income and expenses to manage; it went pretty well, students did well when I told them exactly how much to deduct from their income with rent and utilities. They got hung-up when it came time to make decisions with their remaining money, i.e. how much they would use for food, gas, etc. The students had no reference to make an estimation. In the on-line version, I will need to scaffold the financial decisions better.

needs analysis - 1/20/2007

2007-01-21T10:39:00.000-08:00

This week was spent preparing for and conducting a needs analysis. The needs analysis was created to discover if there existed a need among students at Menchville High School to learn how to make a budget and what kind of money management skills the students had. The entire sample group has not completed the survey at this point. It’s final exam time and I only see the students once during the week.

back in the saddle - 1/12/2007

2007-01-12T18:29:00.000-08:00

This first week I spend deciding the direction I would take this next semester. I was reading “The Millionaire Next Door” and decided it would be a good idea to invest some effort into teaching wise budgeting and investment skills.

I am excited to generate more units to increase fiscal awareness among my students. But the next month will first be spent conducting needs and learner analyses.

project report & revisions - 12/1/2006

2006-12-03T18:45:00.000-08:00

This past week I have been evaluating the process I used to create this instructional product (with a magnifying glass). The project report covers every minute detail of the analysis, development, and evaluation—it is good, but a lot of work. But it and the evaluation proved to reveal a very silly mistake in the instruction.

I originally designed the instructional for the learning to write checks and balancing your checkbook and then had a practice activity for the two subjects. Then later designed instruction for rounding while you shop, although I followed the same pattern for the rounding section, the students only had a few opportunities to practice it.

What I realize upon evaluating the instruction is that the students need more guided practice to round and shop correctly. What I should have done was have the site ordered with the three instructional pages, followed by the shopping activity that implemented each of the three tasks, and then had the students assessed.

rough draft - 11/18/2006

2006-11-18T14:48:00.000-08:00

I have been trying to make each page quality. I have been working with the images so they look good, make increase interactivity with mouseovers with JavaScript- (that took about 10 hours-I probably should have just gave up on them, but I really wanted it.) I have been trying to incorporate more interactivity. I did the recordings in Captivate to capture some needed instruction.

I was finally able to ask permission for the right to use video from “Catch me if you Can.” It’s a dreamworks video, but Paramount owns their non-animation titles so after many phone calls I was able to take to Mr. McCallister over licensing and my request is being possessed.

starving husband - 11/10/2006

2006-11-18T14:47:00.000-08:00

I have been working on the site, day in and day out. I have been working on the estimating and final test pages. I enjoy doing it so it doesn’t seem like too much of a chore, but I defiantly underestimated how much time this was going to take. I promise my husband I will make dinner but can’t seem to pull myself away from the computer for another hour… poor starving husband.

creation - 11/04/06

2006-11-04T19:04:00.000-08:00

This week has been crazy about twenty minuets after my post on Saturday my computer starting acting up. I was having hard drive problems. The good thing about that is I found a way to post my site and the work I have been doing on the web so if my computer dies, I will still have the html that I have been working on incessantly.

I am right on track; I have the check instruction up. I still need to add video and audio, but it’s coming along well. I have an HTML class this semester. If it weren’t for the things I am learning in the class, I would have never been able to even figure out what to do with the web page.

And here she is: my work in progress

site frame - 10/28/06

2006-10-28T13:56:00.000-07:00

Starting to create the actual website has been the most fun portion of this assignment. I created a home site and some of the main pages and have a CSS style sheet that manages all of them.

It has been fun, very addicting, and time consuming. I have to be careful about when I start working with the code because it’s hard to pull myself away. I wish I had a server to up-load the pages I have done so I could link them to this journal!

content analysis - 10/21/06

2006-10-21T21:58:00.000-07:00

The instruction I created last week, over-all, seemed to be pretty effective. I made a paper based instructional lesson to give the student; they then had to read and work through the program themselves to learn the content—as they would be doing if the program were on the computer. The students, all of whom had never written a check or balanced a check book before, could write checks and balance a checkbook by the end of the instruction.

There were a few small oversights that were brought to my attention during the analysis. For example, the instruction starts with learning to write checks. The instruction covers what information to write on which line, but nowhere do I introduce how to write the fraction portion of the written amount, i.e. 83/100 for 83¢ or no/100 for no cense.

Some of the students reported that they felt like they learned how to do something valuable and that it was fun to choose things to buy that they wished they had.
I look forward, within the next few weeks, fixing those glitches and actually creating the site for this.

design instruction - 10/14/2006

2006-10-15T19:26:00.000-07:00

This week I spent designing instruction for learning to write checks and balance a checkbook. I originally was just going to have a lesson on balancing a checkbook, but I realized that students first needed to know how to write checks.

The instruction starts with an attention grabber that will simultaneously demonstrate the importance of this task. I want to include a check-writing clip from the movie Catch Me If you Can (2002) with Leonardo DiCaprio & Tom Hanks. Then instruct students how to write out checks and balance their checkbook. They will then practice filling out checks and subtracting the amount of the check from their current balance; during the practice, there will be corrective feedback. When they are able to demonstrate proficiency filling out the check and finding the new balance correctly four out of five trials, they will be moved on to the fourth and final step of instruction. They will be tested with the same type of scenario that they had in the practice exercises. This next week I will test the paper based instruction with similar students to those who will use the final product.

captivate vs. camtasia - 10/7/2006

2006-10-08T19:33:00.000-07:00

I was able to get special permission this week to download the software onto my IBM school computer to create this math site. The school is viewing the downloading as material that will assist me in instruction. It was the prospect of not being able to use one of these programs that made me change my project to begin with, but I still feel better about the math site then an on-line class organizer.

I have evaluated both programs and have decided on captivate 2. I have an HTML class and a Producing Distance Education Resources class that is focusing a lot on DreamWeaver. Captivate is going to allow me to switch between other macromedia products with more ease.

This next week I will start designing the instruction, it will be interesting to find an effective way to present the material.

analysis - 9/30/2006

2006-09-30T11:39:00.000-07:00

This week consisted of gathering information for the needs, leaner, content and context analysis. As estimated, the learners--who will participate in program testing and use--have low if any functional math skills. The students need instruction that will is repeatable and applicable for retention sake.

I plan on using html, css, and flash as my main scripting lanuguages. I also might be able to get permission to download Captivate on my school laptop. This program would provide more dynamic instruction.

the proposal - 9/23/2006

2006-09-23T17:33:00.000-07:00

I have spent this week writing a proposal for the functional math program I will be creating. It took more time and effort than I planed. Last time when I got done writing the proposal and working out some of the logistics for the on-line schedule organizer I felt like the project was doomed; I didn't have any idea where to go with it. But at the end of this proposal, I feel like I have a pretty clear view of what I want to accomplish and how I am going to do it. I like that feeling and am glad I took the time to set-up a good plan.

This next week I will get the needs, learner, content and context analysis done. I work in the environment and with the students I will be using to test the program so I have some of the needs and learner analysis done already. I am excited to start designing.

scratch and start again - 9/16/2006

2006-09-15T15:07:00.000-07:00

As far as I have been able to tell, Captivate nor Camtasia work on a mac platform. Because I would need demonstrations for the on-line organizational calendar, I decided to create a different project.

I am going to do a math instruction site where low functioning high school students can go and get some math skills requisite for life. This week I started the proposal, I will finish it next week and beable to start on my needs, learner, content, and context analysis.

make a game plan - 9/9/2006

2006-06-28T08:13:00.000-07:00

I searched this week for software for my project. I was planning on using macromedias captivate. I looked at the product online to purchase but could find no evidence that the program works on a mac platform. It was Saturday and I called some places to order software, the people I talked to did not know if the program ran on mac either. I know that Camtasia doesn’t so I am kind of at a loss as what to do.