About the IDEALA blog

Hi there! We thought it might be helpful to go through most of the course ourselves so you can see what we're looking for, in terms of successful completion, and also show you the instructional design process we went through in designing this course. We also hope this helps to relieve any anxiety out there over what our expectations are.

Feel free to find inspiration from how we approached things, but we're sure you'll have a totally different - and probably much better - approach to how you design your final project. Happy blogging!

Erica & Nicole

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.

Week 2 Blog Post

We didn't complete the activity for this week, but thought it might be helpful to share how we would format it:

BLOG POSTS: Create one post with two entries, or two separate entries for this week:

First post: Here you will begin to think about assessment and tying it in to your learning outcomes. You have already thought about and written what your goals and outcomes may be, as well as considered a needs assessment for your learners. Here, you will start to plan how to provide effective feedback to your students. Read pages 13-14 of Fink's Guide and post your answers to the questions on page 15 in your blog.

1. Forward-Looking Assessment Formulate one or two ideas for forward-looking assessment. Identify a situation in which students are likely to use what they have learned, and try to replicate that situation with a question, problem, or issue.

2. Criteria & Standards Select one of your main learning goals, and identify at least two criteria that would distinguish exceptional achievement from poor performance. Then write two or three levels of standards for each of these criteria.

3. Self-Assessment What opportunities can you create for students to engage in self-assessment of their performance?

4. “FIDeLity” Feedback What procedures can you develop that will allow you to give students feedback that is: Frequent Immediate Discriminating, i.e., based on clear criteria and standards Lovingly delivered

Second post: What kinds of teaching methods and content could best help your learners get to the goals and outcomes you set out to achieve? Continue reading Fink, pages 16-25. Start brainstorming how you could link activities and resources to your goals and assessments based on the worksheet on page 23. You don't have to have all the answers, this is just to get you started on thinking about the next phase in the design process. The Carnegie Melon reading should also be helpful in your brainstorming.

Learning goals for course:

Ways of assessing this kind of learning:

Actual teaching-learning activities:

Helpful resources (e.g. people, things): 

Week 3: Learning Theories

BLOG POST: Watch the videos and complete the required readings (we don't mind if you skim). Think about how each theory interacts with your instructional activity for your final project and address the following two points in your blog:

1. In your blog, discuss which theory/ies might be most applicable to your instruction and outline a specific activity/assignment/exercise that would facilitate learning according to that theory. Outline, design, or wireframe that activity in a way that  makes sense to you so you will be able to design it more in depth when you have time. Post all of this in your blog.
   PowerPoint works great for developing wireframes; use anything that is quick and easy and don't try to make it pretty!
2. Write a brief post addressing how you are going to motivate your learners/students, and align your response with the information drawn from Small's article on motivation.
   For this class, we expect that the majority of you are intrinsically motivated to complete this course. Your enrollment was of course optional, and you are likely doing this for reasons that are important to you. We've added in a few extrinsic motivators as well (e.g. blog posts viewable by your coursemates, a certificate of completion).

1. A large portion of this course will rely on constructivist and socio constructivist theory. By having learners identify an instructional scenario that can be used in their own professional environment, we are hoping to stimulate learner-generated knowledge, higher order thinking skills, and active engagement with the content. We want this to be a meaningful experience as much as possible.

Socio constructivist theory will also be at work. First, information literacy and its subsequent teaching strategies are almost entirely derived from the profession, in both very formal (IL Standards, best practices, publications) and informal (knowledge distributed via listservs, email, and in-person conversations amongst librarians) processes. Our profession has its own culture and norms, and these heavily influence the ways in which we adopt and integrate what is expected and accepted. The second way that this theory will be apparent is creating a community of peers within the course, which includes both the instructors and the other learners. Encouraging and facilitating conversations and asking for and giving feedback will be a crucial role in establishing norms and skill and knowledge acquisition.

As for outlining or wireframing, we're not going to go into that here, as the entire IDEALA course site will stand in for that. However, outlining instruction is a quick way to mock up the structure and flow of your course or activity (and it's how we started designing this course), and wireframing is an essential aspect of instructional design, especially if you are building standalone online learning objects (think websites, interactive tutorials, screencasts, etc). If you're not sure what wireframing is, take a look at A Beginner's Guide to Wireframing.

2. With regard to motivation, we give an idea of the activities we incorporated for this course in the activity writeup: For this class, we expect that the majority of you are intrinsically motivated to complete this course. Your enrollment was of course optional, and you are likely doing this for reasons that are important to you. We've added in a few extrinsic motivators as well (e.g. blog posts viewable by your coursemates, a certificate of completion). Hopefully the article on motivation will give you some great ideas for your own instruction.