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.