digital lifeboat

I have been working on a number of design documents looking at the software design and the instructional design for my project.

It seems that designing a Moodle course does not sit fully in any of the familiar software design methodologies. I am looking at a hybrid of Software Prototyping and Rapid applications developement, married to some form of Instructional design methodology.

It would make an interesting research project in itself building up a rationale which can be justified for how to go about the design. Figuring out the learning objectives is straightforward. The tricky bit is mapping out a learning sequence before diving in to build it so that I can document my decisions clearly and illustrate any itterations to the design.

I have found a couple of  sources for describing a sequence of learning activities such as course construction. They appear to have potential for my project.

Searching for applications of learning design related to Moodle course building tapped into the e4inovation blog post Moodling about.

On from there to look at the  JISC funded OU research programme the Open University Learning Design Initiative.

http://ouldi.open.ac.uk/index.html

Happily their ongoing research has already borne fruit in the form of a learning design planning tool CompendiumLD which I will be experimenting with.

I the course of preparing for a recent presentation came across Guidelines to construct a Learning Design Sequence Oliver (1999) at The Australian Universities Teaching Committee Learning Designs Project

http://www.learningdesigns.uow.edu.au/project/learn_design.htm

From the project overview-

Thus, for the scope of this project, a learning design comprises three key elements: the content or resources learners interact with, the tasks or activities learners are required to perform, and the support mechanisms provided to assist learners to engage with the tasks and resources.

I like the way Oliver’s Model uses a Venn diagram to explore the interactions between the content tasks and supports, and also the more linear flow charting method which clearly helps to conceptualise what is going on over the progress of a course

Week 4  was working on the research design. It’s been slow going and I felt bogged down and wanting to start work on the course building before I run out of time.

In the middle of all that took a few days “out” by way of a diversion to do a bit more family history research. Inspired by the 90th anniversary of the ending of WW1 and spent some late nights unravelling the amazing story of a Great- Great- Uncle who died at the Somme.

Anyway as sometime happens, when busy at work and study, a ”mental break”  renews one’s energy to get back to the task at hand.

So to week 5 and a bit of excitement the first tangiable object resulting from the project, the results of my training needs survey are in.

Here the beauty of using Moodle comes into its own. The survey was done on line and the built in reporting tool has already done all the analysis work for me and provides the results in graphical and numeric form.

Comparing this with the effort of the last piece of research I did on the pupils on paper I recall the hassle and inaccuracy, double checking, inputting all the data into excell and then figuring out the correct equations to get a meaningful result.

Granted it took me several hours to build the questionairre, but it was a fraction of the time I spent on other recent paper based surveys. The last time this survey was issued the results were looked at briefly but never analised at all statistically.

All I had to do this time was observe the number of participents entries rising until after a couple of e-mail reminders all but one of my study group complied. I deliberately did not look at the results until they were all in having learned from my previous research that the full picture often looks different from the interim result.

Here is an example showing the way the results are presented for a rating question.

I found that by scanning through the 16 questions I could quickly identify the gaps in knowledge, and those areas where a whole topic was not well understood. For a busy teacher with several hundred pupils this must be of great benefit.

Terry King highlights an issue which affects my project in her paper “Some Ethical Issues Arising in Educational Research”. Here she describes a problem of researching in the field of education where the research subjects may only be accessible for a ‘one-shot’ opportunity to sample the target group.

The “one shot” I am mindful of is the next INSET day in January 2009. This will be my only opportunity to use some of the schools directed training time to get subjects to access and evaluate a course in Moodle.

The short lead time to this deadline means I have to look at ways of accelerating the design process in order to have some material ready for evaluation. A timely blog post by Michael Hanley leads me to The Rapid Guide- How to Rapidly Identify Training needs, by Stephen Walsh of Kineo. Here I have a perspective from industry from which I can extract some tools.

The guide outlines three methods of speedily gathering initial information, surveys, focused interviews and virtual workshops. 

I already have an assessment of training needs survey in progress. Interviews with key staff could be arranged. Virtual workshops would not be an option for me as staff are not yet in a culture of working on-line.

Having gathered my initial data I need to work out what my criteria will be for deciding which courses to implement first.

Using the survey I expect to discover a wide range of potential topics for course material, and give lower priority to those which are not of immediate use to my sample group. Some topics will obviously stand out by being relevant to a higher percentage of potential users.

The Rapid Guide identifies a number of criteria for ranking training opportunities which would be relevant to my study. These include, alignment with strategic objectives of the organisation, external deadlines, return on investment, compliance driven requirements.

I will be returning to the “Rapid Guides” again to see what perspectives inform the different stages of design and implementation.

Huge bank of free resources available at

http://www.kineo.com/elearning-reports.html

Week 2 a bit of a blow out due to illness. A lot on at work managed to hold things together there but had to drop the study ball. Have half term week 3 to move forwards again.

Have more or less finalised my informed consent letter, hope to get this delivered and signed during the inset day at the beginning of term. Lots of discussion and thought about all the info that the study subjects need to have to give informed consent.

As I have been working on my draft specification, I have been thinking around the subject of how to engage the motivation of the teacher students on the courses I will be developing.

In my report last term and in the project specification, are lots of questions which focus on identifying the problem to be solved. The answers are biased towards the technical, and practical issues. Work is already in progress to identiy the gaps in knowledge that the training materials need to address.

There needs to be a corresponding Why? to the What of all the above.

I want to make sure I give attention to the motivational areas, the needing and wanting area as in Race. If the teachers gain a few skills, but do not gain any concepts which they find personally relevant to their own teaching I feel I will not have served them well.

I have been thinking in general terms about the introduction areas of the courses. Here is where I think I should focus on motivation, by making sure that the relevance of the topic in question to their own teaching and learning is explored.

Christopher Sessums extensive research into teacher education leads him to this observation

“I have seen teachers absolutely panic over having to learn how an application works (unlike their students who willingly push buttons to see what happens) rather than looking ahead to see how such a medium might be useful.”

He also askes the question

“Is it possible or realistic to expect teachers who do not want to enhance their basic computer skills to be compelled to do so without any incentives? What’s in it for them?”

Cultural Implications of Social Software Teaching and Learning, Ready or Not

http://eduspaces.net/csessums/weblog/144604.html

In his blog post “Web Learning about Web Learning for Teachers”, Terry Anderson notes

But I wish we could learn to spark interest in the most exiting and revolutionary technology ever to be used for formal instruction, in ways that were just a bit more designed to fire the imagination and engagement of users – both as learners and as teachers.

http://terrya.edublogs.org/2008/09/08/108/

Here is my motivation if any were needed to ensure that the benefits of understanding how to use a particular piece of software or employing a particular tool are stated very explicity in the course materials. Now to think about the means of achieving that.