Advanced Instructional Design & Education Technology - Discussion 3 - Fernandez & Rubens

Developing Online Tutorials:  The Methodology and the Reality

Eugenia Fernandez and Elizabeth Rubens

This article is well-written and perfectly timed.  And what's cooler, it's still relevant, even though it was written in 2005 for the IEEE.  

With that said, it does put a lot of responsibility on instructional designers, "[d]esign methodologies which focus on the pedagogical aspects of the tutorial content are less available to content experts, unless one is fortunate enough to work with an instructional designer" - my italics - (Fernandez, et al, 2005, p. 14).  That is an exciting prospect, however, it is a bit daunting (yikes!), as well.  

It is an extremely empirical paper.  The layout of the framework (below), as well as the illustrative Figure 1, make it very clear the process to follow, even if one is not an instructional designer - which is us, though we are candidates.  

1. Objective:  I think that in the past, I have, as the text mentions of other faculty, "written down a list of topics or vague statements" in an effort to curate a learning model.  I like the emphasis this article places on objective (indeed, as does our entire IDET curriculum - thanks ;)).
2. Specific Activities:  This is quite useful for our group as we are in the process of this right now with a task analysis and breaking down the teaching/intro of VR into its incremental steps.
3. Types of Interaction:  This is critical, and made me think a lot about how we will give feedback to our learners.  I'm thinking some sort of VR social media - potential High Fidelity (Links to an external site.) or Altspace (Links to an external site.), in order for teachers to offer input and our tutors to provide feedback, all the while familiarizing the user with the medium of VR.
4. Assessment:  This is a curious one for us, as our clients and learners are one and the same - innovative educators.  How do we gently assess them in a way that is seen progress (not didactic) and will provide beneficial feedback to further their VR development skills?  Perhaps the e-learning module, again, will be linked to VR social media.
5.  Multimedia:  This is the super exciting part and my favorite - really the whole reason I joined this program.  My VR developer skills are advancing rapidly, and I believe, by the Spring semester I will be able to program and sculpt a virtual environment in which the educator-users will be able to learn how to introduce VR while inside VR.  Sweet, huh?!
6. Identify Associated Documents:  This is, of course, huge for our client-learners.  The literature out there on VR is plentiful but probably a bit mysterious and, even, esoteric to a novice entering the field.  We will have to be particularly careful while coding our website.  Remember the old saw, "If you want to teach a man nothing, tell him everything"?  I have a tendency to do this to my victims, er, clients when I am discussing the potential of VR.  It is very important for our topic to be crystal clear and easily navigable at our supporting website.
7. Extensions:  Extension links are the logical followers of the previous step.  Again, I have a wealth of these, yet they need to be distilled and refined into tidy consumable digital meals for our users.  I'm on it!
8. Time Estimate:  Finally, and perhaps the most problematic because of the novelty of our endeavor - time to complete.  Honestly, we are not aware.  This will take some trial and error.  And, it was one of the questions that we asked of our participants during our interviews.  Estimates from participants and observers ranged from several hour-long workshops to six months of repeated exposure.  This will be our experiment.  I believe the time is shorter than most think, and necessarily depends on the educators pre-existing knowledge, values, and, most importantly, motivation.  

Good, good stuff!  Thanks for the module manual, my Friend.  It shall earn its salt.

Advanced Instructional Design & Education Technology - Discussion 1 - Carrick

Responding to the Learner: Instructional Design of Custom-Built E-Learning
- Neil Carrick

I'm not sure our group can actually do a needs analysis - especially as the technology we are researching is not mainstream, or even well-know, yet.  I feel very much like Steve Jobs when he said that "people don't know what they want until you show it to them."  Now, that, of course, seems quite arrogant.  However, before anyone showed anyone a laptop, they didn't know they "needed" one.  I would argue the a laptop is needed, according modern classroom standards.

Needs, the term "needs," seems to be a serious presumption, to me.  And I'm genuinely not just trying to be argumentative, here.  On page twelve, Carrick says, "[c]ustom-built learning is instruction with specific learners and a specific learning environment in mind."  Well, if we all kept believing that, we'd never have moved beyond slates and church-house classrooms.  This idea that we, as designers, must stay within the box is really counter-intuitive to innovation.

There is no specific environment.  When Socrates was having his discussions & "designing" the way to instruct his students, they were not in a classroom.

Ah, I rant.

My point is that designers must be innovators.  They must think beyond needs.  Needs - in Maslow's terms simply means sustenance, shelter, and clothing - needs.  We are not building to "needs."  We are building to enhance information exchange.

Advanced Instructional Design & Education Technology - Discussion 2 - Chi

Active-Constructive-Interactive: A Conceptual Framework for Differentiating Learning Activities
- Michelene T. H. Chi

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Really great food for thought, this article.

One very important question to our own research on Virtual Reality (VR) occurred to me as I read Dr. Chi's abstract.  Dr. Chi, describing her methods writes, "[s]tudies from the literature are cited to provide evidence in support of this hypothesis."  Given the paucity of research in the domain of VR, and especially the scarcity of research on VR used by teachers in the classroom, could our group not do something similar?  

The majority of the sources that we have found are secondary - literature reviews of literature reviews, meta-analyses, and conference reports.  There is very little in the way of actual experimentation with VR in classrooms.  Certainly, we will use and cite these sources to bolster our argument that VR may be useful to educators and learners who are well trained in its implementation.  A thought - I'd love to hear your opinions on this.

Also, a very decent question comes up - which category does VR fall under, according to Dr. Chi's taxonomy?

I would argue, that depending on the virtual environment accessed, VR may be active, constructive, or interactive.  

Chi suggests that students "steering and peddling a stationary bike while they travel through a virtual environment" are involved in an "active activity" (Chi, 2009, p. 76).  I agree. Students have this option with many Cardboard VR apps.  For example, students may explore a prehistoric jungle and discover names and simulated behavior of dinosaurs in the mobile app "Dinoland VR."Dinoland VR (Links to an external site.)Links to an external site. Activating the device's accelerometer, gyroscope, and compass, the student can walk around the room, with three degrees of freedom, walk towards the approaching dinosaurs, pausing to view them, and, of course, backing up (walking backwards) if they are a bit frightened.

Moving forward (the VR apps that exist today did not exist in 2009), VR may also be very constructive, that is, "[p]roducing outputs that contain ideas that go beyond the presented information" (Chi, 2009, p. 77).  Google Cardboard Camera  (Links to an external site.)Links to an external site.allows students to create 360 degree footage of a scene in which there is a story they would like to illustrate - something that our colleague John Lyman is using to explore empathy conveyed by means of VR immersion.  Also, there is a Minecraft VR (Links to an external site.)Links to an external site. for the Samsung Gear VR (Links to an external site.)Links to an external site. that enables student to literally contruct historical, geographical, and literary scenes (to name just a few learning domains).  Quite constructive and very engaging.

Something that has surfaced on the VR ocean only recently is collaborative VR.  Using Altspace (Links to an external site.)Links to an external site., students may enter self-constructed (or mutually-constructed) virtual spaces where other learners from around globe may share ideas, "[d]ialoguing substantively" (Chi, 2009, p. 77).  Google Expeditions (Links to an external site.)Links to an external site.immerses both educator and learner in virtual fieldtrips.  Content of the Great Pyramid of Giza and the Sphinx, for example, may be explored, the teacher selecting certain foci and directing students' attention to them (a large virtual arrow appears in the students' headsets).  The educator may then read from the lead-in questions (provided by content creators) about the chosen content to get students' feedback and emergent ideas on their immersive exploration.

Thank you for this article - we will no doubt use it as one of our primary sources to cite in our research.