Week 1 Fink Exercises

BLOG POST: Your first post will be briefly establishing your focus for this course, choose what works best for your goals whether it's instruction you will do in the future, instruction you have done previously, or if you have neither of those options available to you, make up a teaching scenario that you would like to use. Read pages 1-6 of Fink's Guide and use your blog to complete the worksheet on page 7. Then read pages 8-10 and use your blog to complete the questions on pages 11-12 to begin parsing out goals for your instruction. These could be two separate posts or one combined post, your choice. Some questions lean more toward higher ed instruction, so if this is not your environment, adapt the questions to your situation. For example, in Question 2 if you are a public librarian, you could read it as: "What learning expectations are placed on this course or workshop by: the community, the library system, those involved in this subject area, society?"

 For simplicity's sake, we'll go ahead and complete Fink's exercises in one post.

Answers to worksheet on page 7:

1. Specific Context of the Teaching/Learning Situation
For the Instructional Design Essentials class we anticipate between 25-60 students. We expect that the majority of learners will have either a master's degree or be enrolled in graduate coursework. The course is completely asynchronous, meaning we will never have the chance to meet at the same time, and will be delivered entirely online. All ALA courses are delivered through the Moodle LMS, which presents specific hurdles.

2. General Context of the Learning Situation
This course is not offered through an accredited agency and has no overarching curriculum. However, there will be learning expectations for the course dictated by the library profession, some of which we will be able to anticipate due to our own experiences, and others we will attempt to gauge through the use of a needs assessment delivered prior to the beginning of the course.

3. Nature of the Subject Is this subject primarily theoretical, practical, or a combination?
We've seen this subject taught in both theoretical and practical ways. For us, providing a combination of the two seemed ideal if we were really going to be teaching the "essentials" of ID. Instructional design is primarily divergent in that there are possibly unlimited ways to approach teaching something. Sure, the learning outcomes could dictate the process (e.g. if the goal is to teach someone how to make a slip knot, there's really only one way to do that), but the means by which the learning is conveyed is mostly divergent. As with most fields, not everyone will agree with how we're approaching the teaching of ID, just as we don't necessarily agree with some of the texts on the topic we've run across. It's all rhetoric.

4. Characteristics of the Learners
Again, we're hoping to catch a lot of this with our pre-course needs assessment. We anticipate that most of the learners will be early to mid-career, working, and busy with family life. Most learners will have had some training or experience with ID, though it can be hard to implement formal training into real life contexts, which is what we're hoping to help with. As for preferred learning styles, we're sure they'll vary and are trying to do a wide range of activities and assignments to expand the course's appeal.

5. Characteristics of the Teacher
Although we're "teaching" the course, we'll be learning new things right along with everyone else. There's nothing finite to the world of ID, and our approaches to doing it have evolved and will continue to evolve with experience. We both have graduate degrees in the field and multiple years of professional experience, which makes us comfortable and conversant, but there will always be more things to learn. As for our teaching strengths, we're open to feedback, quick to make improvements, and genuinely interested in seeing learners succeed.

Answers to worksheet on pages 11-12:
"A year (or more) after this course is over, I want and hope that students will .”

Foundational Knowledge
Key information in the field of ID would be theoretical principles like learning theories, motivation, assessment.

Application Goals
Creative thinking is probably the most important as it will invigorate the design process. When teachers are engaged and interested, learners pick up on that!

Integration Goals
Being able to practically apply all of the lessons into real-life situations will be an essential part of this course. The final project is intended to give learners a working template that they can (hopefully) in real life.

Human Dimensions Goals
That they're good teachers and they have a lot of knowledge to share! A lot of teachers and librarians that I've met struggle with self esteem. Experience is the one thing that seems to help with this.

Caring Goals
If they don't already have it, we hope they adopt confidence in and excitement for teaching!

"Learning-How-to-Learn" Goals
We will certainly be stressing the importance of self-directed learning, especially in terms of keeping up to date on new technologies and the changes in learning theories. With the restrictions we have on the types of reading materials we could share, we sometimes weren't able to choose the "best" texts, and will be encouraging learners to look beyond our reading lists and contribute to the class's Zotero library.