Page 31 - Educational Technology A Primer for the 21st Century

18 1 Introduction to Educational Technology
good ideas. Were any of these corollaries evident in the example of creating a new
online logic course? If so, describe how. If not, indicate how they might have been
brought into that discussion.

1.2.3 Design/Redesign

Designing and planning learning activities, selecting and sequencing resources,
creating units of instruction, and determining formative and summative assessments
are typical tasks to be accomplished as a course is being designed. The big three
issues for those planning and implementing courses are: (a) What to teach (content
to be learned), (b) how to teach (strategies and activities to promote understanding
and mastery), and (c) how to identify things to do differently (evaluation of the
course with the potential to improve subsequent versions).
To guide these activities, it is useful to have an overall approach in mind along
with associated instructional strategies. At this stage, very close collaboration with
the context expert is required. While the content expert is likely to understand what
is to be learned very well, it is not as likely that a content expert will understand
how best to promote the desired learning. Determining the assumptions being made
by the content expert is important as some of those assumptions might require
confirmation or turn out be without foundation. Moreover, a content expert will
often have a desire to do much more than can be realistically accomplished and may
well have a different goal in mind than the one established at the beginning. For
example, a content expert may unwittingly want students to become dedicated
scholars in that subject area, which was not the original goal. Keeping focused on
the goal and desired outcomes is an ongoing challenge. A creative educational
technologist can elicit from content expert ideas about innovative activities and
learning experiences tightly connected with the specific goals of the effort.
Content experts have a tendency to include the full breadth and depth of their
knowledge, while an educational technologist or instructional designer is generally
trained to stay close to activities, content, and resources directly aligned with
desired learning outcomes. Awareness of these different perspectives is important.
The attitude of a content expert might be expressed in this way: “I want my students
to love this subject area just like I do.” On the other hand, the attitude of the
educational technologist might be expressed as follows: “I want students to succeed
in attaining the targeted learning outcomes.”
There are many approaches that can be used in a course. In the logic course case,
the overall approach has been partially predetermined—namely a self-paced online
approach with primary interactions taking place between an individual learner and
the learning system. Within that general approach, there are opportunities for a
variety of instructional strategies, ranging from a didactic and expository strategy
(present content, provide practice cases with feedback, quiz, etc.) to a
problem-based strategy (start with problems and have the learner explored the
resources to find a solution). There are also variations of how much learner control
to include and when it is desirable to include learner control of such things as