Wednesday, December 5, 2007
The End of ID
In all honesty, I think I learned more in this class than I did in both of my other two classes combined. Not only did I get a crash course in different on-line technologies such as blogs, web page design, KSOL, Moodle, and GoogleDocs (which I use like crazy now), but I also learned about how involved the science of Instructional Design is. The main issue I struggled with (mostly that I noticed during my project work) was just how difficult a thorough design would be to complete for a traditional classroom environment. I don't know if this is just because I didn't see enough solid examples from the book on how ID is used in classroom work (in a secondary, non-collegiate sense), or perhaps it was because my topic was difficult for me in general, but it seemed to me that a teacher would either need a great deal of outside help (to help with planning and testing and evaluation), or they would need a great deal of extra time and compensation to complete a good instructional design project with all steps intact. Now, when it comes to non-traditional class planning (like software development or more individualized educational "packet" teaching), this might not be as difficult, both because you would likely be working with a team, and also because you would have more time for planning, since students are working mostly independently. This process also seems a better fit in more technical type environments such as trade or career education, but perhaps it was because I saw more of those examples mentioned in the book (or I'm just crazy, and that's not the case at all). I'm sure as teaching and education continues to evolve, it will fit this process more and more clearly, since I believe that's the way the educational system is developing in order to provide students with an efficient and effective education.
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I am glad you feel like you learned a bunch of stuff in this class - my goal is to teach new tools, but doing so by making students interact with content through them. And yeah - I love GoogleDocs too (try Zoho.com as well, it's also good). The systematic process of ID as we've practiced it in this course is time consuming, but we are using basically one model, and as you know, there are many. A classroom teacher may not have time to plan each unit it detail, but there are ID models/methods that exist that allow him/her to "hit the high spots" and wind up with a decent instructional unit. There may be more tweaking that needs to happen in the long term, but a good formative eval plan can help with that. Good ID is independent of discipline, it's just that some models work better in one area than other models might. The point in being tedious about our design process was to reinforce the important components of each stage. Now that those stages are somewhat in your head, you can adjust as necessary to your context.
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