Documentation:Learning Design/Presentation Outline

=The Quest for Engaging Learning Activities=

Online Paced Cohort Model
Shift in recent years to Online Paced Cohort model. content/faculty/learner conceptual outline insert Terry Anderson diagram

Evaluation
Project arose from desire to incorporate evaluation into design process (refer back to diagram); optimize online learning.

Applied for funding from Open Learning Research Fund, successful and acknowledge support of OL.

Reasons for research:

 * Optimize learning opportunities
 * OLFM workload considerations
 * Most ID takes places in discussion between ID + OLFM/SME
 * decisions based on experience and feedback from learners, faculty, other IDs
 * Courses are complex - hard to pin down what is working for a particular audiance
 * What can we learn from these experiences in a more systematic fashion (analytical AR project)

Goals:
Collect and interpret feedback from the learners, OLFMs and other IDs - that leads us to do two things
 * Refine questions
 * Evolve our design practices
 * Rules of Thumb for effective learning
 * Gaining and interpreting feedback
 * Developing Flexible activity templates and course sequencing (and supporting documents, reusable rubrics)

Two Focus Areas of Research:

 * Collecting feedback
 * Integrating into practice (collaborative work on developing activity templates)

Cataloguing Activities

 * First Step Attempt to Catalogue Activities
 * scaffolding, culminating (examples)
 * interactive - have them look at discussions? design of discussion questions alone -
 * authentic tasks (more meaningful) - going from cooperative to collaborative
 * provide examples of range or ask participants to categorize?
 * highilght the use of rubrics (for F2f, blended)
 * make it an effective use of the learner's time
 * Conclusions:
 * Better to set up flexible templates (they are too complex, evolutionary)
 * Rules of cognitive psychology - ways that you can mix/match these is more evolutionary

Data Collection First Steps

 * Formative stage
 * what kind of questions should we be asking?
 * how to do a mixed-method approach?
 * measure of goodness and explanation
 * try to identify best and worst practices
 * Survey
 * draft questions; seek input from OLFMs teaching paced course
 * surveys sent to 189 students; 52 responses
 * Data Analysis
 * overview of results using Tableau Reader
 * Departmental Benefits of Process
 * dialogue about design and design practices
 * sharing documents
 * systematically sharing and reflecting on practice within time constraints

Interpreting Data

 * Group Discussion: Based on your experience and data so far:
 * When a discussion forum works why does it work? When it doesn't, why not? More structure, less structure, better structure?

=Next steps:=
 * Build catalogue of activity templates
 * Examine successful courses for overall structure; perhaps catalogue successful course sequences
 * Identify specific activities to target in specific courses; build survey links into courses themselves to get immediate feedback when learners complete an activity
 * Ongoing data collection; incorporate data into process for revising new courses after their initial offering

Do we have basic rules of thumb (heuristics)