Community of Practice Reflection:
Evaluating One’s Developed Course Material
By Prof.
Jonathan Acuña Solano
Sunday,
May 3, 2015
Twitter:
@jonacuso
Post 161
Antecedents
After
creating plans and prototypes for an online course, it is important to review
your work and evaluate the materials that you have created. It is important
that you evaluate the course materials that you have developed and highlight
areas that can be improved. But this is something that can only be done when
the process has undergone planning and production.
Here
we have four questions that anyone in instructional design should ask
him/herself. Take a look at this short questionnaire and keep the questions in mind
when working with your instructional design and development.
The
Questionnaire
·
How can you improve the quality of
the instructional resources you have developed?
Quality
–in terms of the instructional resources one gets to design and develop for an
online course- is something that can be improved only with time. To put it
simple, anyone developing instructional resources needs to get confident with
the use of the ADDIE model to create them and review the process every step of
the way.
Evaluation
needs to be one of the cornerstones of this never-ending cycle in the search
for improvement. After this phase, the real creation of the instructional
prototypes and their use in a real course is what will tell us where they need
to be refined to make them better.
·
What challenges can instructors anticipate
facing during the evaluation of the online course?
As
pointed out in several of my blog posts regarding instructional design, evaluation
of an online course is crucial, but only through the gaining of experience in
the ADDIE model –as a creative design process- is what becomes the initial
challenge.
As
soon as we get to develop some “clinical eye”
after working with the instructional resources with real students, we can
determine the areas that need to be improved to make them more profitable for
learners. With a lot of common sense, creativity, and some good training on
video and audio editing, teachers can do magic.
·
How can it be planned to mitigate
these challenges?
As
mentioned before, a way to mitigate these challenges is to evaluate the results
one gets after the use of instructional resources. As soon as students get to
use those resources, there is some sort of summative and formative assessment.
Both of them can give us some qualitative data as backwash that when analyzed can
give us a good insight of how these resources are working to help students
build up their knowledge.
There
will not be an immediate change, but it will trigger some good thinking that
can help us improve to mitigate any “bad” effect we have discovered along the
way.
·
What questions may instructors still
have about implementing and evaluating online or blended courses?
More
than questions about implementing and evaluating an online course, lots of
recommendations come into my mind.
a)
The ADDIE Model is a great tool to work
with educational resources and to make sure they align with one’s instruction,
but it must be borne in mind that we must think globally. That is, it is not
just working with a single week’s learning goal; it is working with the whole
package: 15 weeks.
b)
The implementation phase might take
longer than you think, and for that reason one does not have to panic or get
annoyed. A whole online course takes time to be carefully developed to have it
running well.
c)
Train yourself in the use of Web 2.0
tools and software that can be of use in your field of expertise. The know-how
of all these gadgets around you can become handy.
Conclusion
Online,
hybrid, or blended teaching is no easy task. Improvement in the creation of
instructional resources must be attained via ADDIE rationale. However, it must
be kept in mind that it is necessary to go through the process not just in a
lineal way, but cyclically where any of the steps can be used: Analysis,
Design, Development, Implementation, and evaluation. Challenge anticipation is
one other thing that must be considered. Ideas, for them to get materialized,
may bump into challenges that were not initially thought of, but if this can be
done from the very beginning, the instructor is bound to find ways to overcome
problems. And if questions arise during the designing or developmental stages,
it is necessary to contact one’s community of practice to nurture oneself from the
experience and expertise of others who may have already found ways to overcome
the same challenges we can face.
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