Talk:Katherine Watson's Portfolio Page

Instructor's comments on your instructional analysis and objectives -- Jz833665 14:48, 18 October 2009 (EDT)

Nice beginning. I particularly like how you carefully reasoned in your needs assessment.

A few suggestions re. your objectives:

You said:

Given the ANGEL learning environment and the many media options available to deliver content online, the participant chooses multimedia that promotes student perceived connection with the instructor, as evidenced in their course development proposals.

I'm not sure why you only specify using multimedia to promote "student perceived connection with the instructor." Multimedia learning design has given a lot of thoughts into engaging students more deeply in the content.

KW response - 10/28: The connection with instructor focus was just one objective (which I might now elliminate). I did mean to focus on content more directly with the "learning styles" and other objectives, but I neglected to address it directly. Thank you for highlighting that.

KW question - 10/28 Now, as I try to work through my task analysis, I'm thinking that my objectives are too broad. Most of my research has addressed learning styles and cognitive load issues with multimedia, so this could be my focus. But I am also interested in how multimedia can be used for project-based learning by providing "authentic problem situations" (as you say), and this seems like a broad enough topic for an entire mini-course. What do you think?

Given the ANGEL learning environment and the many media options to deliver content online, the participant generates a course development proposal which utilizes multimedia as a tool for project-based learning, shown in the course development proposals.

This is a great thought. Are you thinking about using multimedia to create authentic problem situations and having students engage in creating multimedia-based artifacts through their project work?

KW response and question - 10/28: I guess if this is my focus then I would create a professional development workshop to help course developers understand how to do this (utilize multimedia for project-based learning), and, yes, I would include authentic, creative tasks in the mini-course. Maybe understanding "learning styles and cognitive load issues with multimedia" would then be a unit-level objective? Thanks so much! -Katherine

Over, it seems that you need to highlight more the media-content connection: choosing and integrating the most effective media to support learning of specific contents (e.g. animation for procedures/skills, visuals for complex system understanding )

Further feedback on your objectives and sequencing -- Jz833665 11:01, 31 October 2009 (EDT)

It is great to see how your thought have developed and deepened as you worked on the objectives and their sequencing.

Currently, your have put in your plate several important concepts: learning style, cognitive load, media-content connection, authentic problems, etc. Your list of objectives is topic-based. A challenge to deal with is to create a coherent structure/thread that connects up all these concepts, with some of them as your core focus.

One possible angle is to generate a set of design principles based on these concepts (frame the concepts as principles): choosing and using multimedia to support different learning styles; to be content-adaptive/effective; support authentic problem solving. So your course may unfold from 1) an overview of multimedia in online learning, to 2) understanding principles of design, and then 3) specific tools and techniques. Most of the specific objectives will remain, but will be aggregated into a new structure suggested above.

Just a thought for you to think about.