Documentation:Learning Design/Presentation Outline

The Quest for Engaging Learning Activities

Introduction to the Design Process (use diagram)

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)