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Computers in use in educational field for about 40 years. Dramatic changes with advent of Internet and World Wide Web. Hundreds of studies show computers is more effective than traditional means of instructional delivery. Instruction should create an environment in which learning is facilitated. Four general phases of instruction should occur for effective learning: 1) Presentation 2) Guiding the Learner 3) Practice/Drill 4) Assessment. Various multimedia approaches rarely include all four phases, but rather, have core strengths in one or two of the instructional phases.
Provides a broad, cursory background on the use of technology to deliver instruction that helps clarify some of the motivation for using technology to begin with.
Was curious about some of the debates and research referenced to make some of the opening statements about whether computers really helped instruction or not, especially the so-called "small effect"
Theory of Learning began early 20th century with Behavioral Psychology Principles which restricted itself to observable behaviors and environmental events. This approach led to today's Integrated Learning Systems. This approach grew rapidly into the systematic approach to instructional design. Cognitive Psychology Principles began to overtake during 1970's and placed emphasis on unobservable constructs and internal processes. Cognitive approaches affected multimedia approaches through several areas: Perception/Attention, Encoding, Memory, Comprehension, Active Learning, Motivation, Locus of Control, Mental Models, metagognition, transfer of learning, and individual differences. Constructivist Psychology Principles is currently dominating the research and thinking today and holds that knowledge is constructed by the learner rather than received from the outside. Constructivist advocate Learning vs. Teaching, Discovery Learning, Construction, Situated Learning and Anchored Instruction and Cooperative/Collaborative Learning approaches.
This chapter shows that each key set of principles have a direct bearing on approach to design of multimedia applications. All three principles are useful, but taking an eclectic approach can be difficult to synergize. It would be best to understand the principles that are driving a particular design approach and work within those principles for the project.
Constructivist theory seems to take quite a radical leap to another level. Wondering whether this is perception due to the ideas not being around as long as the other two principles or perhaps just that I haven't been personally exposed to the constructivist approach in the classroom prior to entering this particular graduate degree program.
Coming from a software development background, this chapter largely covers concepts inherent in just about all software design efforts. The interesting aspects of this chapter dealt with the locus of control, that is how much freedom do you give the user to move around in the application. With a web-based instructional medium, there are going to be times of complete freedom to move around and times of controlling and directing the user through a lesson and awareness of this transition is an important one to keep track of.
I find it interesting that it was stressed so heavily that the mouse should be the primary means of input control. I'm curious as to where they drew this conclusion from as the chief complaint I usually hear of application designs is the fact that the mouse is so heavily used and slows down the user.
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A simulation basically is a tool that models some phenomenon, usually simplifying the model and providing support to the learner, such as coaching, guidiance, etc. to help the learner either a) learn about something (physical and iterative) or b) learn how to do something (procedural and situational).
Physical simulations represent a physical object or phenomenon graphically and allows the user to continuously interact with the artificial environment and see how decisions and manipulations changes the behavior the system that is being modelled over time.
Iterative or process simulations teach about something, but the user runs the simulation over and over setting different parameters at the outset of the simulation and observing where the simulation comes to a conclusion based on those parameters.
Procedure simulations aim to teach a sequence of actions that lead to a desired outcome. While these simulations may contain physical objects for the user to manipulate similar to the physical simulations, the role of the objects is different in that they allow the user to engage in the procedure rather than being the focus of the simulation.
"Situational Simulations deal with the behaviors and attitudes of people or oganizations in different situations, rather than with skilled performances." These types of simulations tend to be role based and draw the user into the simulation in which they are a part of the simulation environment rather than external to the happenings of the simulation.
Simulations serve to bring together knowlege attributes, learner attributes, and simulation attributes in a way that brings about learning in a way that efficiently brings about encoding and representation in a readily useable fashion.
Simulations all have a certain level of fidelity (how closely the simulation matches the real thing), delivery mode (mechanism of presenting the simulation), and instructional strategy (how the simulation functions and the user interacts).
Like all educational software packages, simulations generally have a stated set of objectives and presents these to the user at the outset. The simulations also often have instructional support built in to help guide the learner as well as motivators appeal to the users to complete the simulations and reach the objectives. Careful attention should be paid to the interative design of the simulation to ensure they are invoking the desirable learner actions during the simulation.
The discussion on simulations helped me to better understand what the different types of simulations are out there and what approaches lend themselves learning how to do something vs. learning about something. I realize in reading this chapter that what I am aiming to do in my project is to build a simulation that will teach a procedure, how to build computers, and the focus of the simulation is to support the user's decision making process that leads to successfully choosing the correct components to build a computer with.
Almost all of the simulations discussed and depicted in the chapter were very graphics intensive and I wasn't sure whether this was an oversight of the authors or if fully text-based simulations and environments simply didn't merit any discussion in the author's view given today's world of high-tech graphics and powerful computer systems. I would have liked to see some discussion along these lines and the roles graphics tend to play in a simulation more so than the author's brief discussion about presentation being used to draw the user into the simulation exercise and fully capturing their attention.
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Introduces three stage model for producing interactive multimedia materials:
The model presented is driven seven aspects:
From a software development standpoint, the points covered in the evaluation form section relate to many important concepts that lead to good software design in general. The process or model itself is very similar in scope to the ADDIE model covered in EDIT 6170, though multiple stages, such as analysis and design have been compressed into one stage, such as the planning stage described herein.
Much of the computer industry have a wealth of software tools to manage the design and development and implementation stages. While reviewing the evaluation materials, I couldn't help but to wonder what tools and technology exists to help instructional designers organize, manage, and monitor project status and progress through a life-cycle such as described in this chapter.
This chapter covers the first of three stages of the model presented in Chapter 12, that is, Planning. Planning basically encompasses everything you should do prior to start of actual implementation. This stage of the project allows you to determine scope of the project, content and subject matter, discover who your learners are and their characterristics, general layout and style and approach for the project. You'll also identify resources needed to execute the design as well as constraints and budget and planning schedule that lead to overall estimates for the cost and complexity of the project. In short, plan ahead to avoid failure.
Its very evident that the best approach to ensuring you have enough time and resources to develop something is to map it out in detail. The more you know about what you're going to accomplish and how you're going to achieve your goals, the better job you can do to plan and schedule your development efforts. Its very tempting to just dive into the development effort and then figure things out as you go and this chapter does a good job of expanding upon the importance of planning and especially the tasks to undertake in the planning stages.
At some point in the planning stage, you do start to approach the point where some development likely can start on the project. For example, developing a prototype as an exploratory excercise in choosing an approach to take in the project. I am curious as to how much of a prototyping's effort can be parlayed into other areas of the planning events described, such as development of the style document and general layout guidelines as prototyping, by its nature seems to lend itself to defining these aspects as well.
Design is the architect that brings all the components together in a way so that learning is both effective and efficient. The designer masters the art of working with the content experts and stakeholders in the project in such a way as to clearly define instructional goals and create highly effective learning materials.
Stakeholders for which various design documents are generated include clients, project managers, content experts, trainers and teachers, learners to some extent, and the production staff (writers, programmers, graphic artists, etc.).
Content is generated through initial brainstorming activity, elimination of ideas, breakdown of tasks and concepts through analysis into a tree of sub-tasks and sub-content. From these initial steps, then leads to identifying types of learning, methodology for the program, identifying procedures and required skills. This should lead to a rigorous and systematic treatment of deciding how to factor these components into all aspects of the program and subject matter.
These steps all lead to detailing and communicating the design in forms such as prototyping, defining look and feel, flowcharting, storyboarding. The latter two components are reviewed and revised to find gaps in the design, flush out incomplete directions or inadequately covered topics as well as poor transition and knowledge flow, as well as determining that appropriate levels of learner interaction exists.
Evaluation is stressed as an iterative and continuous process that occurs throughout the entire design and development process and not something that is done just once at end of design or development stages.
Much of the topic here is geared towards team development and organization. Obviously, the larger the project and scope, the more complex and drawn out this stage is in order to ensure all areas are adequately covered and full communication is maintained between all the stakeholders. With the individual project this semester, a lot of the design documentation will be minimal, though many of the steps leading to an effective design will certainly be followed.
Again, coming from a software development background, I see many of the same components and events occuring in this design methodology as occurs in general software development. This chapter gives me much to think through as the various terminologies are slightly different (i.e. stakeholders I am familiar with are project manager, product manager, business analyist, programmer/developer, quality assurance/tester, technical writer, software architect, etc. and documentation I am typically involved in: requirements specification, requirements analysis, architectual diagrams, database schemas, online help, users guide, coding standards and code reviews, testing methodologies, etc.).
This chapters covers the final stage of the design model being presented and that is the development or implementation phase. This is the phase where large teams can often be assembled and actual production of the program and materials that will comprise the end-product occurs. Key to the success of this stage is successful coordination of team and resources in a time and budget schedule and keeping things organized and on track during development.
All the components, text, audio, video, graphics, program code must be developed and then assembled during this stage. Support materials such as Learner and Instructor Manuals for helping the end-users learn and use the application properly should also be written. Additionally, the technical manual for system administrator should adequately describe how to install and support the application on a technical basis.
The authors advocate taking the product through two major test stages and revision cycles, Alpha, Beta, then Final release. Alpha testing concerns more with look and feel and adherence to the original style manual as well as basic functionality of the application. Beta concerns itself with a full testing of the product with a live audience (instructor and learners) with a clear set of procedures to follow in reporting feedback.
Finally, the program is validated to determine whether the learners accomplished the learning goals of the program. This form of valuation is also known as summative evaluation and contrasts to the ongoing formative evaluation where program correctness was of primary concern vs. this evaluation's primary concern with learner outcomes. The four levels of evaluation include:
This is often the easiest stage to carry out in a project and consequentially is often the first tackled by many simply because its easy to put a team together and just go at it. However, it seems that if the work advocated for the planning and design stages are adequately carried out, then this stage should indeed be a straightforward accomplishment that will yield the intended results and matches up with the learning goals very well. As stressed by the authors, ongoing evaluation and testing and revision are often keys to honing the program into a successful learning tool.
Are the three stages necessarily discrete? The authors do not really seem to cover this ground in acknowledging whether or not various components of each stage can be ongoing simultaneously, yet experience from the software development world seems to indicate that planning, design, and development can indeed occur simultaneously when you have a well oiled team in place.
Provided two layouts for doing storyboards, which are discussed in detail in chapter 14.
Storyboarding provides a way to map out screens and flow and discuss points of interactivity about the program interface with the client prior to going to implementation or prototyping stages. It is a good tool for narrowing down a mutually agreeable design and layout before investing time and effort in code development.
Are storyboards the thing of the past in software development? With Rapid Application Development (RAD) Tools, I have often used type screen layout tools of the RAD software in lieu of storyboarding and this seems to work really well with clients.
Listed three documents, Instructor Manual, Learner Manual, and Technical Manual and their possible table of contents. The first two documentation manuals geared towards the two respective audiences and covers the tasks and interactions for each of the target audiences to help them understand the nature of the program and how to work with the program as it is designed. The third manual covers the tasks a system administrator would be concerned with such as setup, troubleshooting, backup/recovery, etc..
Your documentation is not complete until you have written the manuals for how to use the program that has been developed to facilitate learning. This is over and above the documentation that is generated during planning and design phases that support the development of the end-product.
Software manuals? Do companies still release software manuals?
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