Category Archives: Pedagogy

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Instructional Design and Music: Can They Coexist?

When I began my classes for my M.S.Ed. in Instructional Technology (IT), I was often looked upon as an odd duck. Most of my classes were full of classroom teachers, school librarians, and administrators looking to be in charge of a different area. So here I was, a musician in their midst (and a jazz musician, no less), and when I would invariably be asked about what brought me to IT, I always answered, “I’m going to change the way we teach music.” I’ve widened the scope of my approach, and my research, to include everyone I serve at the University, but I still haven’t lost sight of that goal. But the problem isn’t in the discipline itself; rather, it’s in the materials and methodology.

In a previous life, I was a music professor, and tried as much as possible to leverage technology to improve my course materials and course delivery, and to facilitate better learning experiences for my students. However, these improvements tended to be hybrid instruction methods, such as online testing, audio or video lectures, online paper submission or discussion boards. They did make my course more efficient and created more hands-on class time for me, but did little to truly transform the learning experience in the classroom or outside of it. The students thought taking tests online, watching short video lectures, and doing lots of stuff online was “cool,” but as we all know, “cool” doesn’t really equate to a sea change in their learning. (This was over a decade ago, when doing anything online had way more sparkle than it does today.) Looking back on it after studying and practicing Instructional Design for several years, I see most of my former “innovations” are not really that groundbreaking, just repackaging of old lessons to take advantage of some tools I had available.

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Agentic Engagement and Facilitating Discussions

My colleagues at FITS have already provided many helpful tips for developing and facilitating effective discussions in online courses. Josh cautions against teaching a correspondence course and explains, “the best discussion questions don’t have a clear answer, and sometimes they aren’t even clear questions.” He also encourages instructors to provoke debate and ask those pointed and room-dividing questions. And Ashanti provides strategies for generating discussions that matter, such as providing opportunities for student-led discussions and pushing students to draw real-world connections.

Still, even with these strategies and course design principles in mind, it can be hard to get every student involved and engaged. Julie Stella and Michael Corry recognize this, and engagement is a focus in “Intervention in Online Writing Instruction.” Stella and Corry argue for “an interwoven perspective of motivation, engagement, agency, and action in Online Writing Instruction,” and in the process provide some helpful tips for all online educators.

Stella and Corry begin with an overview of the current literature centered on engagement and agency, and specifically the ways these concepts are treated in Self-Determination Theory (SDT). As they explain, SDT is “a framework through which educators may be able to reliably predict the motivation a student feels toward academic tasks.” In other words, the good stuff instructors are always trying to tap into. In SDT, all students – and humans – are thought to be working towards satisfying three needs: autonomy, competence, and relatedness.

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When “Do as I Say, Not as I Do” Comes Back to Haunt You

In the training sessions we provide for faculty who are going to teach online or hybrid courses for the first time, our facilitator, Daniel Stanford, often mentions how instructional technology consultants can serve as “course therapists.” We’re there to listen; to assure faculty that the anxiety they might feel around making such a dramatic change to their teaching is normal; and to help them move through the stages of grief they might experience as they negotiate the losses that result from change.

Given my understanding of this framing metaphor, and given the amount of advice I’ve doled out within this context, I thought I was fully prepared to undertake the process myself when I agreed to teach one of my courses online this past Winter. Surely I could coach myself through the process, right?

As the colleagues I turned to when I needed a therapy session will tell you, I was wrong. In two key ways, I didn’t follow the recommendations I usually give to others.

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Tipping the Balance Towards Scalability

I attended the Council on Global Affairs’ International Women’s Day Global Health Symposium. The focus of the day was on the health of the next generation for women and girls locally, nationally, and internationally. The keynote panel focused on new initiatives and challenges with implementation. Rebecca Winthrop, the Director for the Center of Universal Learning at the Brookings Institute, talked about the science of scalability and her project, Millions Learning, which “…explores specifically not just how to improve learning, but how to do so in a way that can be efficiently and effectively implemented at a large scale.” Her comments really resonated with me. Specifically, she emphasized that successfully scaling up means releasing the idea of having a “gold plated” model that can be replicated with fidelity. That model is too complex and requires finesse specific to a particular author. When scaling up, sustainability is the goal. To achieve this, the cookie cutter model will not work. Rather, it is best to identify the core “ingredients” and aim to replicate those and then allow the user to adapt to their particular context. This creates a partnership that allows the program to maintain its essential attributes, but allows the user to “make it into their own” and have some ownership. Continue reading →

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Beyond QualityMatters: Introducing the Pedagogically Distinctive Features (PDF) of DePaul Online Courses

In 2008, DePaul adopted QualityMatters (QM) as the quality standard for online and hybrid courses developed through the DePaul Online Teaching Series (DOTS) program. During the past eight years, nearly two hundred courses have been through the QM internal review process at DePaul.  Since 2011 when the first instructor was rewarded with a QM star for developing a course that met all of the QM standards, the number of QM star recipients has increased drastically.  These days, becoming a QM star has become a common expectation of all faculty participants of DOTS.

As designers, we are pleased by the numbers and the feeling of “getting a hang of QM”; on the other hand, we ask whether this is the place where we want to be – because that pounding question remains loud and sound: Does QM guarantee a successful learning experience for students?

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Instructional Designers: Preventative Care is for Us Too

I don’t often write directly to my instructional designer colleagues; usually I try to impart some of the occasional nuggets of wisdom I’ve gained from teaching, research or just plain trial and error to faculty, so they can avoid making the same mistakes I have. This time I’ve found a new way to stay inspired and reduce the burnout that can happen in this line of work, and I’m excited about how it has affected my approach to Instructional Design (ID) that it bears repeating.

Over the past decade or so, we have all witnessed a major change in health care. The medical profession has shifted focus from just treating the symptoms to preventative care—the idea that by changing life and health habits earlier on, it will reduce the amount of symptomatic care required for patients later in life. It does seem to be having a positive effect so far, as hospitals have more time to deal with emergencies, and their doctors and nurses spend less time in consultation over health conditions that are ultimately preventable. The individualized care at Los Angeles drug rehab centers is tailored to each patient’s unique needs. A dedicated healthcare negligence attorney in Tacoma will fight for the compensation you deserve for your injuries. Continue reading →

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The Magic of Text Expansion: Type in a Code, A Paragraph Appears

At our recent DOTS Alumni event, a faculty member from the College of Education was going to present on his methodology for efficient and effective grading. He then had a conflict with the event, so I presented in his place – and, as per usual, a colleague’s good idea sparked an interesting research path.

Dr. Philip Gnilka introduced me to the idea of using an Excel spreadsheet with coded comments to give feedback to students. He was inspired by the process detailed in Andrew J. Czaplewski’s article, “Computer-Assisted Grading Rubrics: Automating the Process of Providing Comments and Student Feedback”.

The article details how to grade with an Excel spreadsheet, a self-contained document with an assignment rubric on one page and the codes for pre-drafted comments on a second page. For Philip, this works well. In the spreadsheet, he can fill out the rubric on the first page, type in the codes that refer to the comments he wants to give, and pull those comments into the page with the rubric. He then uses the Save As function to save a copy for the student and either upload (to D2L) or email the graded document for the student.

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Adaptive Learning in the University Classroom

In May of 2014 The Journal asked the question, “Adaptive Learning: Are We There Yet?”. In this article, John Waters gives a nice overview of what adaptive learning is. Waters defines adaptive learning as “an approach to instruction and remediation that uses technology and accumulated data to provide customized program adjustments based on an individual student’s level of demonstrated mastery.” Often found in K-12 classrooms Adaptive Learning models were developed to be able to facilitate personalized instruction based around learning outcomes. Most frequently this type of instruction takes the form of intelligent tutoring systems that “learn” the student’s strengths and weaknesses and provides them with a custom set of activities.

As one can imagine, this form of adaptive learning is best suited to lower order skill sets where memorization or “drill and kill” activities might traditionally be used. Using an intelligent tutoring system provides support for students who may struggle with concepts while not penalizing those who have already mastered them. Many of the textbook publishers have developed robust intelligent tutoring system specifically for these types of classes. Continue reading →

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Jokes, Infographics, and Instructional Design

I came across a Chinese joke the other day talking about how hard it is to be a foodie in the Qin Dynasty. With a series of cartoon images, it shows a hungry foodie time-traveled to a restaurant in the Qin Dynasty. He tried to order one meal after another just to find that none was available because they were either not invented or not imported yet.

At a first glance, it is a merely a joke made for fun; but if you pay a bit more attention to the content, you will find that it embeds quite a bit of knowledge in terms of the development of food culture in China. It reminded me of note cards I made for high school history class when we were learning about the dynasties in China and the development of agriculture. If I add the chart of dynasties, these series of cartoon image would present a vivid image of food history in a country that prides itself for its culinary culture:

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