Competency 3:
Communicate Knowledge
For this competency, I have selected a series of written artifacts that demonstrate my ability to communicate knowledge.
3.3: Demonstrates the ability to adapt instruction and assessment techniques to the needs of diverse learners
Artifact: Group Design Portfolio – EDCI 57200
The group design portfolio and report, which is a result of a collaborative effort to design, develop, and deliver an on-site training workshop for Learning Systems Design, demonstrates my ability to adapt instruction and assessment techniques to the needs of diverse learners. My group, which included three other class members, designed, developed, implemented, and assessed a training workshop for content developers using the Dick and Carey instructional design model.
The goal of the training workshop was for content developers working for ACME Academy to be able to accurately format the Storyline player to fit the desires and standards of a corporate client. Because this training workshop was intended to teach employees a new e-learning content creation tool, we performed a front-end analysis, including a learner profile, to ensure that instruction and assessment techniques were relevant to the diverse needs and experience levels of the trainees, who possessed varying levels of experience using e-learning authoring software.
Based on this information about learners, we were able to identify the specific entry skills that they already possessed. Doing so allowed us to focus on creating specific instructional objectives related to the main instructional goal of the training. Knowing the needs of the learners let us ensure that the training took place in a learning context that closely approximated their work environments; this workplace fidelity, in turn, better promoted an effective transfer of skills and knowledge. Moreover, we designed the assessment tasks to mirror authentic design tasks that the content developer would undertake on an actual project using Storyline. Doing so aligned assessment tasks with workshop learning objectives, and it also confirmed that trainees were learning skills specifically relevant to their job functions.
Because I design e-learning courses, I rarely have the opportunity to design and develop live, on-the-ground training, so this project was both challenging and rewarding, forcing me to flex a set of design skills that I don’t get to use as often as I would like.
My final practicum project for the program demonstrates my ability to effectively communicate content through the design and delivery of teaching/learning activities that integrate content and pedagogy.
For my practicum project, I partnered with a Los Angeles-based small business that sponsors a series of competitions for micro-liquor brands to design and develop an online, asynchronous responsible beverage server training course. Because the project required me to design, develop, and deliver an online course from scratch within a period of seven weeks, I wanted to use a systematic ID model. Accordingly, I chose to use ADDIE (analysis, design, development, implementation, and evaluation) system. By using a systematic instructional design model, I was able to effectively communicate the content of the course through the design and delivery of a series of activities that integrated both content and pedagogy.
I also found this project to be a great opportunity to apply many of the theories that I studied in Motivation and Instructional Design. Because of the rather dry content that consisted of a lot of terms, facts, and regulations, a big challenge in this project was finding a way to avoid “pushing” this information onto learners and both overwhelming and demotivating them. Because learner motivation and situational interest were likely to be low for people entering the course, I knew that generating and maintaining learners’ attention early on would be crucial to creating a motivating course.
To this end, I complemented ADDIE with Keller’s ARCS (attention, relevance, confidence, and satisfaction) model of motivational design (1987) as a checklist to guide the design of the course. Using the ARCS model as a framework, I was able to incorporate many of its prescribed strategies designed to generate more engagement, motivation, and situational interest in the subject matter.
Now that I have reached the end of the program, one of my goals is to organize all the articles I have read over the last year and a half into the different areas of instructional design and the degree to which they are practical and relevant to the types of design work I do.
Reference
Keller, J. (1987). Development and use of the ARCS model of instructional design. Journal of Instructional Development, 10(3), 2–10.
3.2: Effectively communicates content through the design and delivery of teaching/learning activities that integrate content and pedagogy
Artifact: Practicum Final Report – EDCI 57300
3.1: Communicates effectively in oral and written formats
Artifact: "Diane King Case Study: Facilitation and Reflection – EDCI 67200
The research paper I wrote for the Foundations of Learning Design and Technology course (EDCI 51300), “From E-Learning to X-Learning: Transitioning from SCORM to xAPI,” demonstrates my ability to describe common research methods in educational technology.
Because the central component of this paper was a literature review, the challenge was to keep the review of the research relevant to my topic. In this paper, I explore the development of xAPI (or “Tin Can”) as a viable alternative to overcome the limitations of the durable yet limiting Sharable Content Object Reference Model (SCORM) e-learning standard, which cannot track learning experiences occurring outside the browser. From the extensive literature review I performed on e-learning, SCORM, and xAPI—from which I ultimately cited twenty-one sources in the final version of my paper—I could identify a pattern emerging: Research regarding SCORM largely focused on its constraints, whereas critical literature on xAPI focused more on its potential to promote anywhere, anytime learning. Because a literature review should not only summarize findings but also scrutinize them, I described common research methods to make judgments about the validity of some assertions in several articles and identified a gap in the research: specifically, that there has been little critical discussion about how xAPI can be leveraged pedagogically and pragmatically in the instructional design of an e-learning experience. By addressing this gap in the literature, I advanced the discussion, which is a key component of this type of review, by providing my own pedagogical example that could incorporate specific, authentic, and contextualized xAPI-based activities.
As I’ve reached the end of the program, I’ve found that properly describing common research methods is a skill I can use in my freelance career. To this end, I plan to subscribe to several academic journals, such as Performance Improvement Quarterly, that I’ve found most relevant to the types of e-learning projects that I design. Doing so will keep me up-to-date on learning design and technology research trends.
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The case study that I facilitated with two other colleagues in Advanced Practices in Learning Systems Design demonstrates my ability to communicate effectively both orally and in writing.
In groups of three, we were required to design and facilitate the discussion of a case selected from the main text (Ertmer & Quinn, 2014) and to synthesize the key points raised both by the case and by the student responses to the discussion questions that we posed. Specifically, we were responsible for providing a case overview and objectives, choosing a series of readings related to our case, creating discussion questions to advance the discussion of key elements of the case, and moderating the discussion as it advanced in the discussion forum.
Because all group members were separated by space and time and because of the relatively short timeframe available to plan, scaffold, and moderate our discussion of the Diane King case (Ertmer & Quinn, 2014), effective oral and written communication were paramount for both the effective planning of the case study and for the project’s successful execution. Moreover, because each person in the group was assigned a specific role (e.g., team manager, leads for objectives, selecting reading materials, designing discussion questions), effective communication was required to ensure that our respective roles were clearly defined and our efforts were not duplicated. For meetings, we met via Google Hangouts. To facilitate written communication, we set up a Google document, which centralized our ongoing work and provided a way for each us to stay apprised of both individual and group progress.
It was appropriate that our case study, which focused on a rapid-design approach, required a rapid-design approach for its planning and facilitation. Despite the short deadline, our ability to communicate effectively in oral and written formats enhanced the collaboration process and the final implementation of the discussion.
I particularly enjoyed this collaboration because I do not often have opportunity to collaborate on freelance projects with other instructional designers. One of my short-term goals is to seek out other freelance instructional designers who can complement my skill set and try to initiate projects. Doing so will develop my collaborative skills and widen my circle of colleagues.
Reference
Ertmer, P. A., Quinn, J. A., & Glazewski, K. D. (2014). The ID CaseBook: Case studies in instructional design (4th ed.). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson.