When you are in the Design phase of ADDIE, and you are determining your delivery method, there are several things you need to keep mind. The learner is one of the most important things to keep in mind, especially when designing for online or eLearning environments. Ensuring you have done a proper target audience analysis, you should be able to determine the level of knowledge your learners possess when it comes to computers or navigating the web. Your younger generations, whom have grown up around technology, will most likely expect a highly interactive and engaging learning experience, with top of the line graphics to match. Anything less and they will likely lose interest quickly or abandon your learning session all together. Whereas your older audiences are going to require solutions that are not as complex or interactive, simply because they are not as savvy on the computer. Though it may seem like it is a minor issue it truly can make or break the effectiveness of your learning offering. When considering the learner you need to keep in mind the different learning styles. Smith (2008) states "Web-based learners have a variety of learning styles, just as classroom students do...Finding out about learning styles has changed the way I teach."
Next, you want to keep the future in mind. Technology is changing so rapidly it can be very difficult to keep up, especially on the web. When delivering to the web you want to ensure you are developing to the most common denominator for web browsers, because what good is your instruction if they students can't access it. This is an area where you may want to consult with professionals who are in tune with the changing technologies and can provide you with expert advice and support. It is not uncommon for courses to need to be updated shortly after becoming available to students, so you want to ensure you plan for these changes. When you are designing a fairly complex learning environment this is especially critical to remember; the last thing you want to do is pour hundreds of hours into a project to find out that your content won't work in 6 months and you have to rebuild it.
So you have thought about the learner and the future, next you want to think about building your content to the assessment. You want to make sure that you have developed your objectives and assessment questions before developing your content so that you can ensure you cover the materials adequately. Ideally your objectives should drive the design of your assessment which in turn will drive the design of how you deliver your content. As stated in a previous post, if my objective is "Given a baby CPR manikin, the student will be able to demonstrate infant CPR with 100% accuracy without assistance from any training aides." then my assessment of that objective is to have the student demonstrate this task, I am not going to ask them to describe the process to me in a written exam. Now, if my objective had stated "Given a scenario and without assistance, the student will describe the proper procedure for performing CPR on an infant, with 100% accuracy" then I could assess them in a written exam. So for this example, I could provide training materials to the student in video format, via the web, and then assess them in person, or by them submitting a video of their performance, but ideally I would want to teach this topic in the classroom. But, my choice of delivery method will be driven by all of the upfront analysis I performed before getting to this point...or at least it should. You also want to determine how often you are performing formative vs. summative assessments in your course. "If the assessments are opportunities for students to learn, then we are using every opportunity to refine their knowledge as well as evaluate and refine our course" (Smith, 2008, pp. 34). There are other premises that express the importance of learning from our mistakes and by providing corrective feedback to the students at the time of the mistake you can help them to retain the correct information better. When offered the chance to learn from their mistakes, students also have the opportunity to reduce any testing anxiety they may have. We want our students to be successful, but at the same time we don't want our courses to be so easy that they don't actually learn what we want them to learn.
I feel that these three items are some the most important items to keep in mind when determining how to present your content. We want to remember the learner and how they learn, think about the future, and develop effective summative and formative assessments. Sometimes we don't have the option to choose our instructional medium, so in those cases we need to ensure our objectives and assessments reflect the content in the best way possible.
Next, you want to keep the future in mind. Technology is changing so rapidly it can be very difficult to keep up, especially on the web. When delivering to the web you want to ensure you are developing to the most common denominator for web browsers, because what good is your instruction if they students can't access it. This is an area where you may want to consult with professionals who are in tune with the changing technologies and can provide you with expert advice and support. It is not uncommon for courses to need to be updated shortly after becoming available to students, so you want to ensure you plan for these changes. When you are designing a fairly complex learning environment this is especially critical to remember; the last thing you want to do is pour hundreds of hours into a project to find out that your content won't work in 6 months and you have to rebuild it.
So you have thought about the learner and the future, next you want to think about building your content to the assessment. You want to make sure that you have developed your objectives and assessment questions before developing your content so that you can ensure you cover the materials adequately. Ideally your objectives should drive the design of your assessment which in turn will drive the design of how you deliver your content. As stated in a previous post, if my objective is "Given a baby CPR manikin, the student will be able to demonstrate infant CPR with 100% accuracy without assistance from any training aides." then my assessment of that objective is to have the student demonstrate this task, I am not going to ask them to describe the process to me in a written exam. Now, if my objective had stated "Given a scenario and without assistance, the student will describe the proper procedure for performing CPR on an infant, with 100% accuracy" then I could assess them in a written exam. So for this example, I could provide training materials to the student in video format, via the web, and then assess them in person, or by them submitting a video of their performance, but ideally I would want to teach this topic in the classroom. But, my choice of delivery method will be driven by all of the upfront analysis I performed before getting to this point...or at least it should. You also want to determine how often you are performing formative vs. summative assessments in your course. "If the assessments are opportunities for students to learn, then we are using every opportunity to refine their knowledge as well as evaluate and refine our course" (Smith, 2008, pp. 34). There are other premises that express the importance of learning from our mistakes and by providing corrective feedback to the students at the time of the mistake you can help them to retain the correct information better. When offered the chance to learn from their mistakes, students also have the opportunity to reduce any testing anxiety they may have. We want our students to be successful, but at the same time we don't want our courses to be so easy that they don't actually learn what we want them to learn.
I feel that these three items are some the most important items to keep in mind when determining how to present your content. We want to remember the learner and how they learn, think about the future, and develop effective summative and formative assessments. Sometimes we don't have the option to choose our instructional medium, so in those cases we need to ensure our objectives and assessments reflect the content in the best way possible.
References
Smith, R.M. (2008) Conquering the content: A Step-By-Step Guide to Web-Based Course Development. United States: Jossey-Bass Inc., U.S.
Smith, R.M. (2008) Conquering the content: A Step-By-Step Guide to Web-Based Course Development. United States: Jossey-Bass Inc., U.S.