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Contents
- Reflection
- Goal Analysis: Learning Task and Prerequisite Analysis
Reflection
This was a big week for me in terms of expanding my understanding of instructional design. As we tackled learning task and prerequisite analysis, I discovered a number of similarities shared between secondary education curriculum design as a teacher and instructional design as the non-SME (subject matter expert). These similarities are very alluring and I find myself constantly tempted to place my developing understanding of instructional design into my existing schema for lesson planning. However, this week’s set of assignments encouraged me to focus in on the many ways instructional design differs from lesson planning as a teacher.For example, take the “simple” step of writing a learning goal. My approach was to start at the end with what a successful learner would be able to do and work backwards. It made sense to use a backwards design approach because I was taught to plan lessons as a teacher in the same way. It made sense to me because it already existed in my concept of instructional planning, and drawing upon that prior knowledge I thought, “well, this is quite a lot like lesson planning.”
However, to say instructional design and curriculum or lesson planning are all one-in-the-same would be a costly mistake. As I began to map out the learning task and prerequisite analysis, I realized how much changes when the designer is not the SME. Even in the preliminary stages of ID, the need for strong rapport with SMEs to map out the learning goals and objectives is vital to a successful and comprehensive learning program. It was intimidating coming to the design process as a non-expert, especially since most of my instructional development experience has put me at the center of deeply understanding what the learners need to know. I suppose it will take time and practice for me to begin to feel comfortable with the ID process, one that will involve a great deal of “letting go” of my seat in the SME throne, so to speak.
My big takeaway from the reading this week came tangentially out of Chapter 5 of Smith and Ragan. Something clicked while reading about Learning Enterprises, or the idea that there is often cases where an learning goal is comprised of not one type of learning (verbal, cognitive strategies, etc.), but multiple. I thought the authors too briefly touched upon such an important idea as this in the chapter (Smith & Ragan, 2005, p. 82), so I went to the internet to track down the source article by Gagné & Merrill. In the article (Gagné & Merrill, 1990) the authors present the following definition:
"An enterprise is a purposive activity that may depend for its execution on some combination of verbal information, intellectual skills, and cognitive strategies, all related by their involvement in the common goal" (Gagné & Merrill, 1990, p. 30).My understanding is that often the tasks a learner will need to complete to reach a learning goal are varied, and while some tasks and goals may fit nicely into “declarative knowledge” or “attitudes” boxes, the concept of a Learning Enterprise seems to answer the question of how to categorize a goal that contains multiple types of learning. For instance take the following:
“Locate an article, read the article, and determine if the article is appropriate.”Simple on the surface, but once unpacked it becomes a bit complicated in terms of categorization. Locating an article is going to require cognitive strategies in order to know how to effectively skim through the long list of results to find an appropriate article, and a different set of cognitive strategies to read the article. However, to determine if the article is appropriate is going to require intellectual skills, specifically in the realm of discrimination. Smith and Ragan (2005, p.80) define discrimination as “the ability to perceive that something either matches or differs from other things,” a distinct skill that complicates the categorization of this learning goal.
As a developing instructional designer, I plan to carry around the concept of learning enterprises in my tool kit. While it is good practice, it seems, to categorize different types of learning into separate categories, it is also good practice not to view the categories, in the words of Smith and Ragan, as “straight-jackets” (2005, p. 82). Furthermore, as a former teacher I have to be diligent and open-minded while learning about the temptingly-similar steps of instructional design. Letting go of my status as SME won’t come easy, but it will be far easier than trying to work as a stubborn, know-it-all ID.
Goal Analysis: Learning Task and Prerequisite Analysis
Without going into much detail, here are the results of my Learning Task and Prerequisite analysis.
I.D. Project:
The target audience will be Graduate Teaching
Assistants (GTA) at a large research university that are currently
teaching at least one course for the university’s College of Education.
After two hours of instruction, learners will be able
to use a course-provided iPad to record classroom activities, edit the
file using iMovie, save the file to a laptop, and then upload the video
to a module in an online course using the Moodle Learning Management
System.
Learning Goal
After two hours of instruction, the Teaching Assistant will
demonstrate how to use an iPad and laptop to create, edit, save, and
upload a video file to a class hosted on the Moodle Learning Management
System.
Type of Learning Outcome → Intellectual Skills, Procedures (Smith & Ragan, 2005, p. 81)
Learning Objectives
The Teaching Assistant will:
- Demonstrate proper procedures for using a course-provided iPad to record classroom activities.
- Correctly import the captured video into a New Project in the app iMovie using an iPad.
- Demonstrate knowledge of video editing using iMovie by deleting the first two frames of video.
- Save the video with medium quality settings to the iPad using iMovie.
- Correctly export the saved video file from the iPad to a laptop hard drive using a USB cable.
- Navigate to a course hosted on the Moodle Learning Management System and log in as an administrator using a laptop.
- Navigate to a pre-specified module in a class within the Moodle Learning Management System
- Correctly identify the "new activity or resource" link associated with a specified module.
- Demonstrate how to upload a saved video file as a “new activity or resource” to a pre-specified module using the laptop and the saved video file.
References
Gagné, R.M., & Merrill M.D., (1990). Integrative goals for instructional design. Educational Technology Research and Development, 38(1), 23-30. DOI:10.1007/BF02298245
Smith, P., & Ragan, T. (2005). Instructional design. (3rd ed.). Hoboken, NJ: Wiley Jossey-Bass Education.
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