Author: Alecia Duncan

Link to the Interactice Learning Resouirce Draft: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1_Zu3tEcRfEAP03YP-PZ1fdr9Z0O5apjyQmEbWUAoHKc/edit

Hello Catriona, Paige, Gracie, Mirai, and Lotus.

Thank you for sharing your drafted version of your Interactive Learning Resource.

Strengths:

Right off the bat, your overview of the resource stated very clearly what the resource is about, who it is designed for, and a brief overview of the contents. This helped me get a clear idea of what lay ahead for this resource. You stated two very strong and reliable sources on which your pod based your research, which provides me with a sense of trust in the knowledge provided in this learning resource.

The descriptions and rationales for the learning theory, learning design, and learning context are all extremely thorough and backed up by plenty of resources to support your choices. I felt that I clearly understood your reasoning for each of the choices made in these sections, and the choices of cognitive learning theory, direct instruction, and the college student context, all fit extremely well with the topic of study habits and skills.

The aspect of inclusion is clear and included. There is a mention of how the resource can be adapted and used with students who are hard of hearing, a learner that is a single parent, and students who may have limited access to different technologies. Inclusion in education is something I feel very strongly about, so it was nice to see the considerations and adaptations in the rationale for technology choices, and also a more in-depth look at these situations in the ‘Design for Inclusion’ section of your resource. This section towards the end of the document is extremely thorough and extensive in explaining how the resource is inclusive for these learners.

Something that I loved that I wanted to point out was the inclusion of mental and physical health, and how that relates to school and study habits. This is a great subtopic to include, and I enjoyed reading about it in your learning resource.

The grading method of this course is great. The use of complete/incomplete for this course makes so much sense, and there is a clear rationale for this choice. It aligns with what the course is trying to teach, and I believe this method of grading was the right choice for this learning resource.

Room for Improvement and Suggestions:

While this is not a necessary change that needs to be made to the resource, I wonder if this resource could be adapted and used with students in high school? The ‘teacher’ in me can see this resource being used as a preparation tool for high school students as they enter the later years of high school, and transition into college. I know this assignment requires you to pick a more specific age group, which you have done, but if you have time, it may be worthwhile considering how this resource could be used for students in high school. These study habits and skills are useful in those years of high school, and then the students can carry those skills forward into university and college. This is not a criticism! Just a thought I had while looking at this resource.

Please correct me if I am wrong, but I am having trouble understanding how the discussion portions of the learning resource are taking place, as also the general interactive parts of this learning resource. Are they done on a website, such as Google Classrooms to make it online and interactive, or is this an in-person-based course? This may be something you would want to clarify! This may just be me having trouble comprehending things as well!

This may be a misunderstanding on my part, but I noticed that there are multiple learning outcomes for each module. I found this to be repetitive and a bit confusing when trying to pinpoint the goal of each module. A suggestion I have is to only have one main learning outcome per module/lesson and to clarify the learning outcomes for the whole learning resource. This makes the goal of each module very clear.

The criteria for this assignment, it states that we must include one interactive activity per learning outcome. However, from my own understanding, I can only see one interactive activity in total. While there are several activities throughout your learning resource, may I suggest adding a few more interactive activities to your learning resource to meet the criteria?

Conclusion:

Overall, this interactive learning resource is off to a great start! I think the topic you have selected is very interesting and very relevant! The extensive descriptions, rationale, and effort put into this learning resource are fantastic and very clear. I look forward to seeing the final product!

Instructions from Instructor: Go to YouTube, Vimeo, Youku, Tencent Video or hosted video service provider of your choice, and type in your Interactive Learning Design subject area into the ‘search’ box. Choose a video from the list that comes up that you might use with your learners and write a post that addresses 4-5  of the prompts below.

The Youtube video is linked here

Prompt 1) What kind of interaction would the video require from your students? Does it force them to respond in some way (inherent)?

This video would require three types of interactions from the students: student-content interaction, student-teacher interaction, and student-student interaction (Anderson, 2003). However, unless the teacher poses activities and questions based on the video, there is no inherent or required response from the students to the video directly. The teacher-student interaction would be required to create that inherent response from students (Bates, 2019). Active participation is not guaranteed with just the video alone, so the teacher-student and student-student interactions would push for that participation and inherent response. Students would be talking to each other to generate ideas, and the teacher would supply the prompts for the students based on the video.

Prompt 2) In what way are they likely to respond to the video on their own, e.g. make notes, do an activity, think about the topic (learner-generated)?

On their own, the students will have a little-to-no response to it. It is not a great strategy to put on the video and just walk away. However, if an activity is created and given to the students to do either alongside the video or after watching it, the response and learning from students will increase drastically. Even if the video is paused throughout to give students time to think, reflect, and talk to an elbow partner about what has just happened in the video, their overall engagement and response to the video will definitely increase. I know this from personal experience, and it is a strategy that works any almost any age. However, because it would be a good choice to have the teacher be involved in the student engagement with the video, the response to the video would not be learner-generated (Bates, 2019).

Prompt 3) What activity could you suggest that they do, after they have watched the video (designed)? What type of knowledge or skill would that activity help develop? What medium or technology would students use to do the activity?

An activity that I would use for my students to create positive engagement with the video would be something relatively simple in terms of preparation for the teacher. The activity I thought would be an activity where students get into groups (3-4 students per group), and work together to draw and create a mindmap to summarize what they learned from the video. Each group would get a handful of markers and a big piece of paper. After 25-30 minutes, groups would present and show their mindmap to the rest of the class. This is a great activity for students to engage in cooperative and collaborative group work. Practicing fair work distribution, communication (taking turns to talk, listening to others, respecting all ideas), staying on task and on topic, and other practices involved in group work is a very necessary group of skills in every student’s life, so it is handy to have students collaborate frequently. Every student needs to make sure that they contributed to the mindmap in some way to ensure equal participation and fairness.

Prompt 4) How much work for you would that activity cause? Would the work be both manageable and worthwhile? Could the activity be scaled for larger numbers of students?

As I mentioned above, the activity involves minimal preparation from the teacher, and minimal materials as well. It is nothing revolutionary or special, but these kinds of collaborative activities are extremely effective for interaction and learning for the students. Both of these aspects make this activity very manageable, and worthwhile. This activity could be done with as many students as you want. The group sizes would stay the same, there would just be more groups in total, which is fine. It would result in more posters and mindmaps, but I do not see that being an issue at all.

Prompt 5) How could the video have been designed to generate more or better activity from viewers or students?

This video is strictly for informative purposes. However, a relatively easy way to increase engagement and participation from students would be to turn the youtube video into an EdPuzzle Resource. EdPuzzle is a software that allows the creator to have a video play, and then it pauses after some time and quizzes the viewer on what they have just watched. Typically the questions are not skippable until answered, so it would become an activity that creates inherent responses and engagement from the viewer (Bates, 2019).

References:

Anderson, T. (2003). Getting the mix right again: An updated and theoretical rationale for interaction. International Review of Research in Open and Distance Learning, 4(2), 1–14.

Bates, A. W. (2019, October 10). Chapter 9.6: Interaction. Teaching in a Digital Age Second Edition. Retrieved October 26, 2022, from https://pressbooks.bccampus.ca/teachinginadigitalagev2/part/9-pedagogical-differences-between-media/

Prompt: Choose one (or more) of your planned learning activities from your Blueprint and identify any barriers to student success. How can you alter or adjust your current plan to reduce those barriers?

I plan to look at two different activities in my group’s blueprint for our Interactive Learning Resource; an activity involving labelling a complete water cycle diagram, and an online quiz tool that asks students questions via a video, and passes along the way to have students answer those questions based on what they have just watched or heard.

The first activity is going to be rather basic in nature. After learning all of the parts of the water cycle, students will be required to label a water cycle diagram by themselves as a way of checking for student understanding. This activity is great and simple but also presents some barriers for students. To make this activity more inclusive, I would make it more accessible to all students. For example, the activity could mainly be done on a worksheet with a pencil or pen, but I would also make it available to be done on a computer or some other digital format to include students who may struggle with writing or have motor skill issues. The online version could also have an audio component to make it even more inclusive with its design. This type of inclusive change would fall under the sections of “Providing multiple means of representation” in the Universal Design for Learning Guidelines (Meyer, et al., 2014). This is because the redesigned activity can be represented in multiple ways so that it comes available to all students, and provides equity within their learning, even if that change is just on a small activity like this.

The second activity can be changed to not only include the auditory component of the video, but include the voice of someone reading out the questions orally, and also include subtitles along with all audio. The small adaptations and changes made to this activity fall under the same designation on the UDL Guidelines as the first activity I spoke about above, but it specifically provides multiple means of perception, as it provides a visual and auditory way of perceiving the activity (Meyer, et al., 2014). Offering alternatives to the original format of this activity helps make this activity accessible to more students than it would have been without these adaptations and barriers being removed. Subtitles have always been something that teachers need to consider when playing anything with audio, as it is beneficial for hard-of-hearing of deaf students, but also for EAL (English-additional language) learners so that they can hear and read the audio to enhance their comprehension.

Meyer, Anne, et al. Universal Design for Learning: Theory and Practice. CAST Professional Publishing, an Imprint of CAST, Inc., 2014, UDL Theory Practice, retrieved from: udltheorypractice.cast.org/

Inquiry and Research into Direct Instruction as a Method of Teaching

I chose to take a closer look at the teaching method of explicit and direct instruction. This, in my opinion, has always been a standard method of teaching, and is what most people think of when they think of education; a teacher standing up at the front of the class lecturing and talking while students sit at desks and face the front. That is a very narrow version of direct instruction, but as I have learned, direct and explicit instruction can look different in many situations in education.

A common example of direct and explicit teaching is teaching through examples and demonstrations (Boxer, 2019). This is a way of direct instruction that I have used not only in teaching but in many other scenarios where I have to teach someone a new skill. I recently re-taught my partner how to do long division, as he had forgotten from his elementary school years. I showed him how to do it by walking through multiple examples with him. I gave him explanations and reasons while using an example to teach him how to do long division.

Direct instruction comes from the concept of how learning works, and it creates a sequence where the c communication during teaching is clear and faultless (Boxer, 2019). Considering how people learn, direct instruction takes into account two important beliefs about learners: learners have the capacity to learn through examples, and learners have the capacity to generalize new information based on the sameness in the quality of previous examples (Engelmann & Carnine, 1982). These are both very important beliefs that teachers should have when applying direct instructional methods, as they instill that students are capable of learning.

I find it interesting that it took me so long to realize that explicit and direct instruction included teaching by example and leading with demonstrations. I never associated the two, but as I am learning about direct instruction more, I understand now that providing examples and giving demonstrations is a form of direct instruction. I always thought that it was just the typical stereotype of the teacher lecturing at the front to a group of silent and listening students. This brief inquiry has helped me to better understand direct instruction, and how it can be beneficial as a teaching method, but does not need to always be the only teaching method.

Resources:

Boxer, A. (Ed.). (2019). The researched guide to explicit and direct instruction: An evidence-informed guide for teachers. John Catt Educational, Limited.

Englemann, S, & Carnine. (1982). Theory of institution: principles and applications. Eugene, OR: NIFDI Press.

September 19th – Blog Post #1

Readings: Why is Learning Hard, Learning Theories

Prompt: Share a story about how you overcame a learning challenge. Why was it a challenge? What strategies did you use?  Use the language you learned in this unit.

When I was 16 years old, I passed my learner’s driving knowledge test, and I immediately wanted to start driving a car. However, my options for vehicles for learning to drive were a very large pick-up truck or a small car that had a manual/stick shift transmission.

The only time I drove the pick-up truck, I hit a trashcan, so I opted for the small stick shift vehicle. Before this, I had no driving experience apart from video games such as MarioKart on the Wii Console, so I understood the basics of steering, gas to go forward, and brake to stop, but that was it. So now I was faced with operating an actual vehicle that I not only had to steer, use the gas and brakes, but also had to understand gear shifting. My father and I spend many hours driving around in an empty parking lot learning how to shift the gears of the car. Once I understood, in theory, when to change the gears based on my situation while driving, I would put it into practice and it was one of the most challenging things I have ever learned. I found it hard to understand what the clutch was doing and how to press it at the right time and then shift into the right gear all while moving/braking/steering to make sure I don’t crash. It was the most multitasking my brain had ever done, and that is why I found it so hard. I had to think about so many things at once just to operate the vehicle properly, and I also had to pay attention to the rules of the road and focus on other drivers to ensure my safety.

This learning experience was so hard for me because I had to change my mind about what I thought driving was. If I was learning to drive an automatic vehicle, I believe the learning curve would’ve been much faster and easier. I had to learn about how my use of the clutch and gear shifting affects the car, so I was also learning about the engine at the same time, which added another layer to my learning.

After months and months of stalling thousands of times, and practicing almost every day, I eventually became confident enough to take the manual vehicle out by myself, and I only stalled once during my first solo drive. While I am nowhere near perfect with driving a stick shift vehicle, I used the strategy of repetition and feedback to improve my skills, which reminds me of a behaviourist approach to teaching. The learning, me, was receiving reinforcement/repetition of the skills while getting consistent feedback on my performance from my teacher (my father). While this process of learning this new and complex skill was tedious, gruelling, and hard at times, it made it worth it, and I am grateful or my father’s patience and guidance when he was teaching me.