week 6

Last week, our team decided on design scheme for our project. We will use some metaphor such as notes, books, etc. We also spent lots of time wokring on our objectives. We checked our tasks together one by one. It was definately more helpful than working on them alone. Also, the content has been revised, so we needed to reflect content changes in our task analysis.

This week, I worked on task analysis again with test items and performance objectives. Although this is not first time working on it, I get frustrated everytime I work on it. Also, sometimes the matter of testing constrain our creativity in that we do not want to come up with objectives that cannot be "measured". Anyway, our team will discuss more about it tomorrow night and hopefully we will move forward so that we can start our storyboard next week.

week5

Last week, we had Emily back so we could discuss more about the content. Since the task due this week is the timeline, we were able to think about bigger picture about our project while discussing the timeline for each task. Anything specific has not been decided yet, but we agreed that we would meet this week with some ideas on the activities, screen designs, etc. Emily also said that there will be some content changes. I reviewed the timeline that Emily primarily worked on. It seemed nice but somehow not easy to figure out what we need to get done.

We received Dr. Clinton's feedback on our task analysis and objectives yesterday. What we did was task inventory but what he wanted to do us was a set of performance objectives. We will discuss more about it tomorrow during our team meeting. Next week, I'll mainly work on those revisions.

Week 4

Last week, we received some feedback on the scope document and the needs assessment. I sometimes think that usually it is possible to find out what our client needs, but sometimes it is not easy to realize what learners need. Of course there is a matter of "numbers" of the prospective learners in case of a large company training modules. I personally think that design of learning should reflect what learners want to gain from it, yet it seems that in most cases, we should meet what client needs as they have right to decide.

Anyway, I brought a rough draft of the learning goals, objectives and task diagram and we discussed about them based on my draft. The content was not familiar with me, although I tried to find other references to improve my understanding. It was good that we have many people in our team so that I can get some help from them. There was the most frustrating point while I was working on objectives and tasks. As far as I remember, Dr. Clinton stated that learning goals are something expected to do in real world while objectives are something needs to be achieved in instructional settings. My team is working on two units of plant pathology-one is about basic concepts about plant pathology (knowledge) and another one is about plant disease investigation. The ultimate reason we provide these two units is to make the agents competent to do plant disease investigation "in real world" and they need to apply some basic plant pathology concepts while they are working. However, our teammates wondered if we would be able to measure those "skills" considering this is delivered online. Thus, we decided to come up with lower level of objectives although the learning goals are remained refelcting the needs of the application skills in real world.

It is of course important to measure if learning was effective or not, yet sometimes, I think objectives limite students' abilities as they set some boundaries for the safety zone (regarding grades). Just some random thoughts..

For the last week, I primarily worked on objectives and task analysis. My team worked together using email as usual and I submitted our team's document today. Next week, I assume that I'll work again for those as we receive feedback from Dr. Clinton.

Week 3

Last week, we finally got the content from our SME. To review and get familiar with the content would primarily my job as I'm supposed to work on instructional design. We discussed a little about the content when we had our team meeting last week, and discussed all the details about needs assessment and the scope document. We've been working on the document emailing back and forth, and finalized the documents today.

I've been going through the content, but plant pathology is totally new to me, and it is not easy to understand. It seems that almost everytime I design some module as a designer, I need to study the content by myself even if there is a SME. Luckily, the content documents are quite well-organized. I got a draft of instructional goals and task analysis and will share with my team tomorrow night.