IT 5340: Essential Question

As a reminder, the first step in planning a digital story is to decide what the “essential question” is. The essential question centers on the philosophical, moral, or thought-provoking theme.

Next, you need to decide on the unit questions, which address the learning outcomes and training benchmarks by asking students to analyze and contemplate the implications and reasons behind the content in the learning outcomes.

For my class project, my essential question is “How can I offer the best experience to a customer who calls with a storage array problem?”

The unit questions are

• What is the relationship among the components in the storage array?
• What is the process needed to diagnose and troubleshoot a problem?
• How do I know that there’s a problem with the storage array?
• What resources are available to diagnose and solve the problem?
• How do I develop a plan for solving the problem?
• How do I implement a problem solving plan?

IT 5340: What is Digital Storytelling?

The Center for Digital Storytelling states: “Many individuals and communities have used the term “digital storytelling” to describe a wide variety of new media production practices. What best describes our approach is its emphasis on personal voice and facilitative teaching methods. Many of the stories made in our workshops are directly connected to the images collected in life’s journey. But our primary concern is encouraging thoughtful and emotionally direct writing.”

Jason Ohler states: “Digital Storytelling uses personal digital technology to combine a number of media into a coherant narrative.”

Wikipedia states: “Digital Storytelling refers to using new digital tools to help ordinary people to tell their own real-life stories.”

For this class, our working definition is: A first person narrative told in the writer’s spoken voice. It is a combined with a variety of media including images, audio, and sometimes video to convey an instructional objective as part of a larger instructional unit.

IT 5340: The Essential Question

It’s important to consider the “essential question” when developing an instructional unit. This was news to me when we were asked to come up with our essential question and the unit questions for an instructional unit.

An essential question centers on a philosophical, moral, or thought provoking theme.

The unit questions address learning outcomes and training benchmarks by asking students to analyze and contemplate the implications and reasons behind the content on the learning outcomes.

For more information, check out these resources:

• http://www.research.ibm.com/knowsoc/index.html
• http://cbae.nmsu.edu/~dboje/strategic.html
• http://www97.intel.com/en/ProjectDesign/UnitPlanIndex/GradeIndex/

 

IT 5340: Imaginative Education

I listened to a video about Imaginative Education that is located on the Imaginative Education Resource Group website: www.ierg.net. The video is titled “IERG Ideas Discussed on TV”. Dr. Kieren Egan is the main speaker.

The Imaginative Education Resource Group is a group of researchers, teachers, graduate students, parents, and others who would like to make education more effective.

Here are the notes I took while listening:

Main Question

·         What skills and experiences do students need from their academic education?

·         How can school be a meaningful experience?

Typically: Determine the objectives I want to meet, the course content, and then the methods. This is more like building a refrigerator.

Imaginative Education: Start with the emotional aspect and significance of the topic. When our emotions are engaged, our imaginations are engaged.

What We Can Do Better

·         We need to provide informative and relevant lessons.

·         We need to consider how to make the content personally meaningful and emotionally engaging and exciting. What role does what we are teaching play in the students’ lives?

·         Education needs to be a discovery process that allows the imagination to take place.

Ideas That We Can Implement

·         Narrative

·         Storytelling

·         Mental imagery (Create characters out of inanimate objects.)

Psychological Theory

·         Constructivism and Vygotsky

·         Cognitive learning

 

IT 5130: Two People Active with Web 2.0

I keep running across these names and want to make sure that I do not lose their names:

• Carl Fisch is known for his “Did you know?” video.
• Professor Wesch from Kansas State University is doing some cool things.

IT5130: Using Job Aids

On page 25 of “Writing Online Training Tutorials,” Martin Tessmer tells us that “Any critical or lengthy body of information – a table of terms, a matrix of factors to consider when solving a problem, a five-step procedure, — should be styled as a printable document that can be saved for just-in-time reference by the trainee.” This struck me because I’ve been wondering how a job aid (printed instructional message) would “fit” into a course.
 
Specifically, for our final culminating project, one of the requirements is to include a printed instructional piece. I’ve struggled with the best way to integrate such a document. According to Tessmer, it’s a good idea to create the job aid first and then capture the gist for the course topic/lesson (p.24). I plan to try this method for my final culminating project. I’ll try to put myself in the learner’s shoes and think about what information they will need to support them after they complete the course. I also plan to have students use the job aid by asking them some practice questions that require that they use the job aid. I’m thinking, too, that in addition to including job aids as part of a course it would be helpful to post them in another location. This would allow learners who’ve taken the course easy access to the document as well as people who had not taken the course.

IT 5130: Levels of Knowledge

After reading the “Individual Differences Principle” chapter from Mayer’s book, I realize that the learner’s level of knowledge about a particular topic impacts how well they retain and are able to apply what they learn. Even more than I realized, it’s important to understand your audience! This sounds obvious but we often create courses and expect them to help multiple levels of learners. For example, I know that I have created a course to teach learners how to operate a product. The intended audience for the course was end-user customers andddd service personnel. Based on what Mayer says, if I used multimedia learning events that were based on the cognitive theory of multimedia learning, the course will most likely benefit learners with low-level knowldege the most. In this case, that would mainly be the end-user customers.

I need to re-think how I plan these “Operations” courses.

I wonder what I can do to help the learners with a higher level of knowledge?

IT 5130: Mayer Chap 9-10

I just finished reading chapter 9 and 10 from Mayer’s Multi-media Learning book, and several questions come to mind. Last week, I had a idea to include a few “expert interviews” in an online course that I’m developing to help learners understand a few complex processes. I wondered how much pre-scripting I need to do? Should I just let the “expert” how the questions that I would like him to answer as part of the interview? Or should I plan it out in more detail?

Based on the readings where Mayer tells us that narration and animation is better than narration alone, I suspect that I should plan out the script so that I can work with the multimedia designer on the visuals needed to accompany the narration.

I need to think more about this… Thoughts anyone?

IT 5650: Planning for the Advanced Training

What I’ve Discovered as I Planned for an Advanced Course

• Students need to start with a solid understanding of the product before moving to advanced course.
• We need to add behind the scenes data flow type of information to our main field service online courses so that students understand the effects of the settings they make.
• In the Elements of a Science of e-Learning, Mayer talks about how to help learners understand explanations of how scientific systems work… Scientific explanations are a type of conceptual knowledge. When students were asked to apply their knowledge, here’s what was discovered:
• —-Dual channels: visual/pictorial and auditory/verbal
• —-Modality Effect tells us that students learn better from animation and narration than from animation and on-screen text. Why? The animation can be processed in the visual channel while the narration is processed in the auditory channel thus offloading some of the demands of the visual channel.
• —-Contiguity Effect tells us that students learn better from animation and narration at the same time.
• —-Pre-training Effect tells us that students learn better when components explanations are provided before the presentation.
• One other note is that we should provide an interactive learning event before students get to the point of TMI to help students tie together what they just learned.
• The main course should teach students how to solve basic troubleshooting. If X happens, you do Y.
• All of this BASIC knowledge and skills can be learned online… Research supports this as well.
• Learning more advanced knowledge lends itself well to collaborative environments.

Learner supports such as Job Aids are important take-aways for students when there are things that students need to remember from the course but they won’t because there are too many details or because the information is complex. The content in the course should be more of a summary, and the job aid should include the information (including details) that students will need to know after class to perform their jobs. In addition, we need to give students practice questions that require them to use the job aid.

The advanced course should teach students how to think outside the box. It’s the type of information that doesn’t have a concrete set of be circumstances. There are many variables and the situation could be different for each customer.

Problem-based learning in groups (with a facilitator) helps learners guides students through constructing the knowledge they need. It allows for scaffolding.  The problems should help students develop the higher-level thinking needed to solve problems. Start with easy problems and work their way to more complex problems.

Problem Solving as a method: Learning is supported and enhanced through settings that encourage and enable communication and interaction among students.mKnowledge is constructed through social interaction. Students structure and restructure information to make sense of it when the collaborate.
What students can do with help they will be able to do on their own after practice.

IT 5650: Need More Advanced Training

My department has been asked to create more advanced courses for our field service teams. As a department, we have to figure out what this means. To date, we have been developing courses that helped field service learn how to use the product and perform basic troubleshooting. Based on initial discussions, it sounds like the field service teams need to better understand how the settings they make affect the behind-the-scenes operations of the product. With this understanding, the field service teams would be able to better troubleshoot the product.

For my final project, I will create a proposal for a solution that meets the needs of field service. I plan to start by conducting a needs analysis.