Week 11 blog post

-

Prompt: What technology challenges have you faced? What “people” challenges have you faced? How have you sought to overcome these difficulties? What have you learned about completing a major project within a professional deadline? What will you do differently next time?

What were your strengths as a designer?

What do you need to improve?

So far, from a technology point of view, I have encountered very few challenges.  I had to learn some ins and outs of the LMS and how it can function in the way that I wanted it to.  For example, a I wanted to create a more interesting overview page for each of my modules.  With the background in web design, I found that I could use HTML inline styes to create a design for the pages.  This gave me some freedom to edit the look, but because of the way the pages are built, I had to span and div most things, and then give them each their new style.  This wasn’t really difficult, but time consuming and a little tedious.  

I also found that since I was working on a Mac, and using Pages as my word processor, that I had to export my files to a more universal document before I uploaded them to the site.  I thought word files would be best, but the formatting has changed a little too much for my liking when I do that, so I started just using either google docs (for when I want them to be able to edit things) and PDF’s (for when I just need them to read something).  

There hasn’t been many people challenges other than the old silly man inside my head.  My peers have been better than I am at responding to requests to give peer feedback, but my allowed time for working on this isn’t at the best time for most people, so I fear I have become more of a speed bump than I want to be.  I have tried to make time outside of my formal nocturnal weekend routine to answer questions and work on my work, but it’s something I need to be better at.  

The completing of the work within a professional deadline has been difficult, but I like to think it’s because of lack of time to actually work on it.  With work and Covid, and the election, and other distractions eating up a lot of my time.  When I do sit down to work, and actually get things done, I think my time that I have put in to this project has been pretty on par with what would be expected of me to do in a professional setting.  

I have also noticed one of my strengths about working like this, but it’s one that creates problems for finishing things in a timely manner, is my ability to improve on initial ideas and make them better as I go along.  My first thoughts about how to complete this course was good, but I found many different things that I though were either better the learners, or worked better for the course, so I kept changing things.  This creates a bit of a mess on the planning document, but the outline is still there.  

I need to improve on varying the types of things I expect the learners to do.  I have found I am comfortable asking them to learn in a very specific couple of ways, but it’s harder for me to think of ways to reach kinesthetic learners for example.  I want to vary up the type of activities too so the course doesn’t get boring or stale as well.  6 to 9 weeks is a long time for an online course, and doing the same thing each week has to have diminished returns, especially for those in my target audience.  

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

LTECH 5510 - Week 4 Blog - Different Instructional Design Model - Component Display Theory

-
Image
Prompt: answer and discuss the following: What was the model What is the point of the model? How is the model different from what you already know? How is it the same? Is this model something you may use? Why or why not? How is an ID model different from a theoretical model (i.e. social constructivism)? Why is this distinction important? Do you think such a differentiation will matter for a client? What was the model Component Display Theory (CDT) What is the point of the model The point of the component display theory is that “instructional outcomes, represented either by objectives or test items, can be classified on two dimensions: student performance (Remember-Instance, Remember-Generality, Use, and Find) and subject matter content (Fact, Concept, Procedure, and Principle).”  (Merrill 1994).  This theory can be represented by a grid or matrix, where each set of performance task can be put into it.  Like such:  Each performance task/question will be attempting to ...
Read more
-
Week 4 Reflections: Prompt 1: What have you learned from the analysis? What are you planning to do with it? Do a little brainstorming about what activities tied to your learning objectives that you might include in the design of your lesson. I have learned many things from doing the analysis and the design about this project.  I have learned much about the process of creating meaning instructional design.  First identifying a problem, and then looking at the data as why that is a problem was the first wow step for me.  It's simple in idea, but understanding what exactly is going wrong with something, really starts to open up ideas and paths to fixing the problem that may not have been apparent at the beginning of the initial client interview.  The next "ah ha!" moment was shedding light on the idea that to fix the problem you have found, you need to first better understand what you want the end product to look like.  We have been taught most of my educatio...
Read more