Cognitive

Artifact: EDTEC 671 Practice and Feedback in Web-based Tutorial

It feels like an awful lot of Web-based instruction these days is designed with very little thought. No analysis of instructional goals, no thought given to the audience or individual learners who need the instruction, and especially no analysis of instructional effectivness.

It’s my last semester in the program, and I’m taking 671, Learning Environment Design. This is a great class to take before I graduate because it reinforces so much of what I learned in 540, 544, and 572. I’m revisiting Ruth Clark and Component Display Theory, I’m relearning the nuances of writing and classifying objectives, and I’m getting an opportunity to develop learner practice items and write intelligent feedback.

The Anti-671

It’s also interesting that I started this class at the same time I was finishing a distance education course offered through AHIMA, the American Health Information Management Association. I needed to learn about the SNOMED coding system and AHIMA offered a self-paced workshop on SNOMED basics. Privately I called this workshop “Anti-671, or What not to do in a Web-based Tutorial.” It was a simple page turner, and not even the fonts were eye pleasing. Very little (if any) thought was given to engaging the learner, offering practice opportunities, or testing instructional effectiveness.

So as I embarked on the design of my Web-based tutorial for 671, I kept firmly in mind all of the things that I didn’t like about the SNOMED tutorial. I analyzed as much as I could about my own situation: the audience, the objectives, and the size of each content chunk. I particularly thought about how often to intersperse practice and feedback with new information. Then I tried to balance my own analysis against the research evidence.

EBP

As a health care librarian, I’m very familiar with evidence-based practice (EBP). In healthcare, EBP relies on statistically sound research – rather than expert opinion – to ensure that effective treatments are selected by a physician for each patient. In education, EBP means that an educational intervention is selected only if research has shown it to be effective. I love Ruth Clark and Richard Mayer’s e-Learning and the Science of Instruction because it compiles, in one resource, evidence-based guidelines for the design and development of Web-based instruction. I particularly love the checklists at the end of each chapter. As I focused on learner practice and feedback for this assignment I returned again and again to the checklist at the end of chapter 9 "Does Practice Make Perfect?" I was able to mark the check boxes for my tutorial: I offered several practice exercises; the exercises were job-realistic; they went beyond simple recall of information (I offered a job aid instead); the exercises were distributed throughout; I wrote clear directions; and feedback was offered close to each practice exercise.

I’ve never considered myself a designer. I’m not really a visual thinker or learner, and I have trouble translating what I see in my head to paper or computer screen. But the EDTEC program has shown me that design problems are just as much cognitive as they are creative. Being able to think about the design of instruction analytically and objectively, and incorporating existing research, can take a design a long way. This was perhaps the biggest aha! moment of my time at SDSU, and one I hope to carry with me throughout my career.

 

Clark, R. C., & Mayer, R. E. (2003). E-learning and the science of instruction: Proven guidelines for consumers and designers of multimedia learning. San Francisco: Wiley.