Final Project (final post!)

Instructional Design eCourse – Final Project

ONE: A description of your environment: your teaching scenario, learners, purpose or end goal, and timeline. Are you teaching face-to-face or online? Is this a tutorial or a course? A one-shot library instruction session? Be specific.

My focus for this course / final project is be the credit course I will be teaching in January at California State University, East Bay. It is a two-unit, freshman-level course. Each section has approximately 30 students. It is a 10 week course, and the instructor can choose how many of the weeks have an in-person meeting vs. "online meeting" (via Blackboard). At this point, I'm planning for 8 in person meetings/weeks (1 hour, 50 minute classes) and 2 "online" weeks (when students will be meeting with me to discuss their research projects, and class content will be available via Blackboard).  For the in-class meetings, we will be in one of the two library classrooms. Neither classroom is outfitted with computers, but laptop carts are available to provide laptops for students on the days they are needed. They do have furniture that can be moved to suit a variety of learning activities. There is projection capabilities for both the instructor and student presentations. 

TWO: Your learning outcomes. These should be based on the needs and expectations of your environment. Are these outcomes appropriate for your learners?

The learning outcomes for the credit course I’ll be teaching are derived from the ACRL Information Literacy Standards, and are as follows:

Upon successful completion of the course, the student will be able to:

1.     Determine the extent of information needed

2.     Access the needed information

3.     Evaluate information and it sources critically

4.     Use information effectively to accomplish a specific purpose

5.     Access and use information ethically and legally and understand that there are ethical, legal, and socioeconomic issues surrounding information and information technology

These are the learning outcomes for the course that are shared across the twenty or so sections of the course that are taught each quarter. They are appropriate for the goals of the course.

THREE: How will you assess your learners? What formative and summative assessments would best fit in your teaching scenario? Do they align with your outcomes?

The summative assessment for the course is a signature assignment (a reflective essay) that is assigned in all sections of the course.  A rubric is used to score a random selection of assignments across the sections. 

In terms of formative assessment within the section I will be teaching, I will use and/or develop rubrics that relate to the student learning outcomes for the course and tie those to individual activities/ assignments so that students know what I am looking for and exactly how their work will be evaluated. Those rubrics will be shared with students in advance so they can check their own work prior to submitting it for grading. I think the suggestions in the Fink document to have students receive feedback on either a low-stakes assignment or a non-graded assignment prior to the first graded work would be helpful to demonstrate to students how grading/assessment will be performed in the course, so they can see the “rubric in action” if they haven’t already seen it in previous courses.

FOUR: Learning theories and other instructional approaches to implement. What learning theories best support your outcomes? How might you leverage these theories to develop content and assessments?

I think the constructivist approach best matches what I plan to use in the credit course. I will be designing activities that have students pull on existing knowledge and wrestle with questions/prompts that I provide in order to come to their own conclusions. Having as many hands on / exploratory activities as possible where the students are asked to complete and reflect on a particular task without a lot of prior instruction (demo-ing) I think it the best way for students to be able to internalize a particular skill / behavior with the hope that it will transfer to other, non-classroom contexts. Building reflection into the in-class learning activities will be one form of formative assessment, as well as have in-class learning activities that feed into the formal assignments / graded assessments for the course.

FIVE: What tools will you use to deliver this content and have learners interact with your instruction? What might work best and why?

For my final project, I can think of several educational technologies / tools that would be appropriate. First is Blackboard, the Learning Management System used on the CSUEB campus - though the majority of the course I will be teaching will be in person, there are a couple of "online" sessions for the course where I will be posting videos / screencasts / other content.  Blackboard will also provide the central "warehouse" for all of the instructional objects I want to share with my students. For those videos / screencasts, I may use Jing, which I've used in the past, or VoiceThread, which is new to me, but it is a tool that my library has a site license for and other instructors at my institution have used successfully.  I'll also use some of the basic functions of Blackboard like the forums, quizzes, and grading module to increase engagement with the instructional material and provide formative assessment opportunities.

SIX: Reflect on what you have learned. What has been most useful? What do you feel you are still struggling with? How has this course changed how you approach instruction?

I think this class has been incredibly helpful, especially in terms of directing me to resources that will continue to inform my instructional practice in the future.  I wish I had had the time to dedicate to completely mapping out my 10 week course as part of this course, but I haven’t been able to find the time to do that. I hope to carve out the time to do that in the next two months (before January and that first day of class rolls around!) and I feel like this course has given me some really helpful tools/guidelines to inform that work for me to head into the classroom with confidence that I’m providing an educational experience for the students that is interesting, thought-provoking, and is closely tied to the learning outcomes for the course with formative assessment opportunities that really help students to know what they are learning and where they are struggling, hopefully to help them all succeed in the course.

SEVEN: Finally, did you find any of your coursemates' blogs particularly helpful? Link to any particularly useful posts or entire blogs from your peers. What have you learned from your peers? Did you add any additional resources to the Zotero group that you find exciting or interesting?

I think I learned a lot from the different approaches that people take – we are all struggling with common issues, but we take different approaches to solve those issues. I’ve found several ideas that I’m going to try and implement in my own instruction (either wholesale or with some tweaking to better suit my “authentic teacher self” J).  As far as the Zotero Group, I haven’t explored it much at this point but I know that it will be a great resource as I work to map out my entire 10-week class as well as for future revisions to the class that I’m teaching.

Educational Technologies (Week 4)

What technologies (and these can be old, new, or emerging) might be most appropriate for your final project? Does your final project align with any of the trends represented in the Horizon Report you reviewed?  

For my final project, I can think of several educational technologies that would be appropriate. First is Blackboard, the Learning Management System used on the CSUEB campus - though the majority of the course I will be teaching will be in person, there are a couple of "online" sessions for the course where I will be posting videos / screencasts / other content.  Blackboard will also provide the central "warehouse" for all of the instructional objects I want to share with my students. For those videos / screencasts, I may use Jing, which I've used in the past, or VoiceThread, which is new to me, but it is a tool that my library has a site license for and other instructors at my institution have used successfully.  I'll also use some of the basic functions of Blackboard like the forums, quizzes, and grading module to increase engagement with the instructional material and provide formative assessment opportunities.

Will this application/tool enhance, improve instruction or motivate learners? What similar applications/tools are there to consider?
 I believe the use of all of the tools I mention above will enhance and improve the instruction for learners. I hope to use it in ways that continues their engagement with the material and each other outside of the classroom, since we only meet in person once a week.  I like some of the options in VoiceThread for interactivity with presentations / PowerPoints... I can't wait to learn more about it / play more with it!  It seems like a much more interactive option for that type of material than Jing. With Blackboard, there aren't really other options to consider, since that's the mandated LMS for my campus.

Week 3: Motivation

In reading Small's article on motivation, particularly the section on the ARCS Model of Motivational Design, I was able to identify practices that I already incorporate into my teaching practice as well as get ideas for new practices and sequencing of practices that might have the most beneficial impact on students in my classes.  One example in the reading was something I'd planned to pilot this upcoming term when I teach a credit course again, and that was in the category of "Relevance - Familiarity: presenting content in ways that are understood by and tied to learner's experience and values."  Related to the activity I discussed in my other week 3 post, I was going to "challenge" students at the beginning of each of our in-person sessions with an information problem, and have the students draw on their own experience to recommend an information source.  So, for example, the day of our first class, I plan to ask students to imagine that they need to recommend an information source to a friend that will help their friend find the location of our campus. Students will then recommend their favorite "map" information source, whether it is an app on their phone, a website they use, a trusty Thomas Guide in their car, some sort of way to navigate by landmark, etc. Then the students will be asked to explain the pros and cons to using the information source they've selected.  My hope is that this will get the students in the practice of thinking critically about information sources, including those that they've incorporated into their day-to-day lives. As the quarter progresses, the information queries will get more complicated, but still be "fun" or not too serious, so students can practice thinking critically (selected a source to recommend while weighing pros and cons) in a non-evaluative way. My hope is this will translate into them being more critical with the sources they select for the final project for the course (fingers crossed).  But, there were many more elements of the ARCS model that I plan to implement in my course, but I won't go into all of them here!

Week 3: Learning Theory

I'm a little late posting for week three because I spent the weekend prepping for a Sociology one-shot I taught this morning; I had the luxury of having 70 minutes (not 50!) and incorporated some "active learning" that I'd intended to bridge the students from "where they were" (Google, Wikipedia) to where I (and the faculty member) wanted them to be (peer-reviewed articles). The students have a 10-12 page research paper due in December. I think the approach that I took falls into the "constructivist" area, because I was asking students to apply prior knowledge to the task and raise questions as they encountered them.

The class activity (after some general introduction) was for students to work with a partner, and look at a list of the top ten Google results for a particular search (I'd printed out a screenshot of one in advance, so they'd all have the same results). They were to label the results as media sources, academic sources, or Internet/"Wildcard" sources (I'd earlier related Internet sources to "Wildcards" - I had the luxury of two Bay Area baseball teams recently participating in wild card playoff games so I was able to tie that concept to the idea that you don't know what you're going to get when you find something on Google). They worked in pairs identifying the source types. Once done, I asked them to take it a step further, and for those that they identified as Internet/Wildcard sources, I had them create lists of Pros and Cons for each source (there were three) of why they should use them for their research paper and why they shouldn't use them. After working with their partners, the class discussed the pros and cons as a larger group with myself and the faculty member chiming in as needed.  The students brought their own previous experience with sources to the discussion and had the opportunity to apply what they'd just learned by exploring some sources with their partner.

The students were incredibly engaged, and were asking questions about where they could find "true" scholarly sources (peer reviewed articles) since they weren't in the Google results.  This segued into the rest of the session, which was still collaborative with students as many of the students had some experience with scholarly research and were able to volunteer and share that information with their peers while the faculty member and I took more of a "guide on the side" approach.  It was super fun to teach and I'm going to think of ways to tweak it to have it be even more effective in the future - as well as develop assessments so that I can confirm what I think I observed in the classroom and learn more about which areas of the activity can be improved.

This is my combined post for the two tasks for Week Two of the Instructional Design Essentials Course:

Procedures for Educative Assessment

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.

Below, I’ve generated ideas for two learning activities. During these activities, students will identify sources that meet the information need described and turn in a worksheet describing what sources they found and why they found them to be appropriate for the proposed situation.

Learning Activity 1: Working alone, students can imagine that someone in their family has been diagnosed with a disease.  Ask the student to find three reliable sources of information on that disease to share with their relative so that they can ask their doctor the necessary questions for ongoing care.

Learning Activity 2: Working in pairs, ask students to imagine that they have begun working in the sales department at a local car dealership. Their boss has tasked with gathering information to help identify the towns in their area where people are most likely in the market for new automobiles.  Using some of the research tools learned in the “Business” section of their course, find three reliable sources that would help inform this report.

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.

One of the main learning goals for these learning activities is the ability to “Evaluate information and its sources critically.” For these activities, I would require students to explain their reasoning for selecting sources.  The AACU Information Literacy VALUE Rubric provides excellent criteria for poor to exceptional achievement (used below):

Poor / Fair: Shows an emerging awareness of present assumptions (sometimes labels assertions as assumptions). Begins to identify some contexts when presenting a position.

Questions some assumptions. Identifies several relevant contexts when presenting a position. May be more aware of others' assumptions than one's own (or vice versa).

Identifies own and others' assumptions and several relevant contexts when presenting a position.

Exceptional: Thoroughly (systematically and methodically) analyzes own and others' assumptions and carefully evaluates the relevance of contexts when presenting a position.

3.    Self-Assessment

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

In order to allow students to self-assess their work, I will provide the rubric I will be using to give feedback on class activities and other class assignments to students along with the directions on how to complete the activity and assignment. From the Fink document, I really liked the ideas of having students suggest the kinds of feedback they’d like when turning in the assignment, as well as asking them to explain which portions of the task they found to be difficult / that they struggled with.

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

This is tough, just from a time management perspective. I already indicated that I plan to share the rubric for activities and assignments with students before they are due, so that should address the “discriminating” element. The frequent and immediate are going to be difficult – I’m in the process of learning to use the rubric function in Blackboard, and I’ve heard from many people that this does indeed speed up the grading process, so I hope this will help! For the lovingly delivered component, I do try to keep my language positive (while using the feedback sandwich – always opening and closing with positive feedback, with the negative/constructive criticism in the middle). Honestly, I want to know if others have tricks for encouraging students to read the feedback – I always get the feeling (and sometimes the proof) that they don’t.

Situational Factors

Assuming you have done a careful, thorough job of reviewing the situational factors, how well are these factors reflected in the decisions you made about learning goals, feedback and assessment, learning activities? What potential conflicts can you identify that may cause problems? Are there any disconnects between your beliefs and values, the student characteristics, the specific or general context, or the nature of the subject in relation to the way you propose to run the course?

In reflecting on what I have written about so far for this class, I think the number one issue or problem that I may run into, in terms of the course and the student characteristics, is that most students already believe they are efficient researchers, and many come into the class with the attitude that it is a waste of time. With the “forward looking” assessment and learning activities I hope to show students that the skills they are learning and applying in the course will benefit them in both their personal and professional lives after they leave college.  In addition to providing many real world examples / activities, I plan to intersperse the class time with fun and humor – to not have everything they’re doing in class be serious (or “boring.”)

Learning Goals and Feedback & Assessment

Issues to address include: How well do your assessment procedures address the full range of learning goals? Is the feedback giving students information about all the learning goals? Do the learning goals include helping the students learn how to assess their own performance?

I will use and/or develop rubrics that relate to the student learning outcomes for the course and tie those to individual activities/ assignments so that students know what I am looking for and exactly how their work will be evaluated. Those rubrics will be shared with students in advance so they can check their own work prior to submitting it for grading.

Learning Goals and Teaching/Learning Activities

Do the learning activities effectively support all your learning goals? Are there extraneous activities that do not serve any major learning goal?

As I work further on mapping on my plans for activities and assignments throughout the course, I will be able to eliminate activities that are “extraneous” or don’t serve a major learning goal. For those activities I plan to include to increase the “fun” factor in class, I will make sure those activities are also tied to the main learning goals of the course.

4. Teaching/Learning Activities and Feedback & Assessment

How well does the feedback loop work to prepare students for understanding the criteria and standards that will be used to assess their performance? How well do the practice learning activities and the associated feedback opportunities prepare students for the eventual assessment activities?

Again, the sharing of the rubrics with students in advance and the application of the rubric feature in Blackboard will allow students to see exactly how their work was assessed within the parameters of the rubric. I think the suggestions in the Fink document to have students receive feedback on either a low-stakes assignment or a non-graded assignment prior to the first graded work would be helpful to demonstrate to students how grading/assessment will be performed in the course, so they can see the “rubric in action” if they haven’t already seen it in previous courses.

Questions for Formulating Significant Learning Goals
"A year (or more) after this course is over, I want and hope that students will...”

Foundational Knowledge
The overarching goals I have for students in this class are for them to leave the course as critical information consumers (approaching all information with a sense of healthy skepticism and questioning attitude) and that they consume and produce information ethically.

Application Goals
Tied to the goal of critical information consumption are critical thinking skills as well as information seeking skills. The weekly group activities and final project for the course will require that students think creatively, as well as practically (several of the activities will incorporate elements of problem based learning). Students will need to learn how to seek out appropriate sources that meet their information needs. They will need to learn how to determine the quality level of various sources and effectively communication why the sources they do find are appropriate for their topics/projects.

Integration Goals
Students are going to have the option of pursuing topics for their final projects that relate to personal interests, coursework, and future career plans. Students should be able to make connections from the material covered in class to their personal, school and business/career lives. Their final projects will require them to seek out information sources as well as ethically produce an information source themselves. The theme of the course will tie to material being covered in the other courses they are taking in their freshman learning community.

1. Specific Context of the Teaching/Learning Situation
My focus for this course will be the credit course I will be teaching in January at California State University, East Bay. It is a two-unit, freshman-level course. Each section has approximately 30 students. It is a 10 week course, and the instructor can choose how many of the weeks have an in-person meeting vs. "online meeting" (via Blackboard). At this point, I'm planning for 8 in person meetings/weeks (1 hour, 50 minute classes) and 2 "online" weeks (when students will be meeting with me to discuss their research projects, and class content will be available via Blackboard).  For the in-class meetings, we will be in one of the two library classrooms. Neither classroom is outfitted with computers, but laptop carts are available to provide laptops for students on the days they are needed. They do have furniture that can be moved to suit a variety of learning activities. There is projection capabilities for both the instructor and student presentations.


2. General Context of the Learning Situation
This course is a required course needed for graduation, and is part of year-long freshman learning communities. Students can choose a topical area of their choice, and they are then matched with general studies courses that correspond with the topical theme. The campus has recognized the importance information literacy-related education, and the course has specific learning outcomes tied to the ACRL Information Literacy Standards.

3. Nature of the Subject
Within the context of this course, students are expected to think critically and apply what is learned in the course to efficiently and effectively locate and "consume" quality information in a wide variety of contexts and formats. As mentioned above, the current course student learning outcomes are mapped to the previous version of the ACRL Information Literacy Standards, but I plan to incorporate elements of the new standards when I teach the course in January. In addition, I plan to bring in relevant activities and examples that help students see the usefulness of the skills and concepts being learned beyond producing student research papers.

4. Characteristics of the Learners
Students that take this course are planning to obtain a bachelor's degree from CSU East Bay (a wide variety of majors are offered, but many students pursue degrees in business and nursing). a majority of the students at CSU East Bay work 20 or more hours a week in addition to taking a full course load. Many are first generation college students. I plan to have students complete an anonymous survey the first day of class to ascertain their learning goals, expectations for the course and preferred learning styles. I do know from colleagues that many students are opposed to the fact that they have to take the course, as they assume that they already know enough to get by without successfully completing the course.

5. Characteristics of the Teacher
As the teacher of the course, I have over ten years of experience working with college students' information needs, and I have two years of experience teaching a credit-based research skills course. I am passionate about the subject and believe that students can greatly benefit (in school, in work, in life) from the concepts and skills covered in the course. My greatest strength as a teacher lies in my desire to continuously improve the course based on student input, feedback and formative/summative assessment mechanisms included in the course.