Learning Objects and Instructional Design

my WebQuest link

So here we are at the end of the trimester and it’s time to think about teaching and learning activities and technology. In Ped II we saw a U-tube video from TechWatch of an interview with Cheryl Lemke about her review of studies on the impact of technology in learning. The paper is called Technology in Schools: What the Research Says. The research overwhelming shows that technology has a positive impact on learning in many areas. She spoke of the positive aspects of tools such as gaming, virtual dissection, and computer assisted instruction such as for reading. Over the last two trimesters I’ve learned about many new tools that could be used in different situations, but not all of them would fit in all situations. When I thought about teaching a totally online course, I realized that alone would be quite a lot of technology for many students at the community college level. So the tools within whatever Content Management System that I was using would probably be enough of a learning curve for them.

But I’d spent a lot of time reading about learning objects and then a lot of time trying to decide what kind of a learning object I might make for a totally online Women’s Studies course. There is no one definition of a learning object, but it is a discreet self-contained unit of learning that can be removed from one place and used in another. The terms includes such activities as discussion board and chat rooms, computer animated games and simulations, to workshops and seminars. Here are some excellent resources on learning objects. First from the American Society for Training and Development and SmartForce is A Field Guide to Learning Objects. This was a great general overview. The best overall document was written by Susan Alvarado-Boyd and published by the New Media Consortium and is titled A Traveler’s Guide to the Learning Object Landscape. From that guide I was able to read research and white papers, and visit learning object repositories on the web. If you are going to get into designing and making these objects I highly recommend Guidelines for Authors of Learning Objects by Rachel Smith (another document of the NMC).

For my final Web Design II project I decided to work on a WebQuest. WebQuests are a concept created by Bernie Dodge of San Diego State University back in 1995. A very basic definition would be an inquiry activity on a topic in which most or all information used by students is accessed via the World Wide Web. I looked at many examples and they applied to much younger students than mine would be. But I thought that this model would be an excellent way for me to think about the idea of using scaffolding as a teaching strategy. The National Resource Council says like training wheels, computer scaffolding enables learners to do more advanced activities and to engage in more advanced thinking and problem solving than they could without such help. By scaffolding I hope to free up the student’s research time – enabling them to essentially do more learning in a shorter period of time. Scaffolding out there in the work world is a temporary support for workers and in my case it is to support a student’s learning. Scaffolding needs to: provide clear directions, a clear purpose, help keep students on task, clarify assessment and evaluation expectations, point students to credible sources, reduce uncertainty and fear. In a short term WebQuest the instructional goal is knowledge acquisition and integration of a significant amount of new information. Somewhere I read an article by Tom March who reminded us to keep WebQuests rich, relevant and real. No small task at the community college level. So in my mind I was thinking: make a connection to learner’s own life, use multiple modalities, offer choices, ask students to think critically about the world, use constructivist problem solving methods, make it a self-guided tour, and explore a different way to bridge the gap between what they know and what they need to know, where do I begin?

The topic I chose for the WebQuest was the first wave of the women’s movement. As Dodge suggests there are five major areas of a WebQuest to think about. Each carries as much weight in the grand scheme as the others. First there is the introduction where I tried to make the topic intriguing and connected to background knowledge from the previous weeks. The task is the next step. Research shows that students will learn more if this task is sitting on the edge of their learning and if it is meaningful work. I chose to give examples of various types of magazine articles that they could relate to and ask them to write their own article from what they had newly learned. In the process section goes all the resources. It was hard to narrow these source possibilities down to a few – but I believe I gave them enough to support them where they are with the material. The evaluation piece is a rubric I designed to help them understand how I was going to evaluate them. I kept in mind a wise teacher who told me that anytime I’m going to make a rubric only chose between 5 and 8 things to focus my evaluation on. The conclusion ties the whole unit together, by clarifying for students the details of where their work will be posted and giving them extra sources if they want to continue their inquiry.

I had no idea when I began what I was getting into. By making this WebQuest I was essentially doing Instructional Design on a micro-level. I needed to do the design of the unit: goals and objectives, assessments and evaluations, and activities and resources. Then I needed to take the unit I designed and put it into an HTML document with easy navigation and clean code. It took me thirty hours to prep, design, and code a WebQuest that I was happy with from start to finish. It is essentially one unit of a fifteen week course, so it might not have been an economical use of my time, but as a learning experience it couldn’t be beat.

My biggest aha moment was a new and improved understanding of David Wiley’s article Connecting learning objects to instructional design theory: a definition, a metaphor, and a taxonomy. I didn’t really connect with it until I went through the lengthy process of actually making an object. Learning objects need what he calls purposeful use. By using instructional design strategies to make my WebQuest I made sure I wasn’t just trying to make cool bells and whistles in my course, but that my object clearly supported my student’s learning. And now I also understand his atomic theory metaphor. Having been taught the Tinker Toy model of atomic theory that is what I envisioned the first time I read his paper, but that’s a truly lousy model of an atom. My WebQuest is a self-organizing unit within my WMS1020 course. Within my WebQuest is a learning object from MERLOT (Multimedia Educational Resources for Learning and Online Teaching) and it is another self-organizing unit. Hmmm it’s becoming clearer and I appreciate the metaphor all the more! And I’m seeing how these little self-contained units are being used and reused and showing up in combination with other units all over the web.

Alvin Toffler’s coming to mind: The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who can not read or write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn and relearn…