|
The Association for the Advancement of Computing in Education's (AACE) annual EdMedia was held in Montreal Quebec at the end of June. EdMedia is the AACE's World Conference on Educational Multimedia, Hypermedia & Telecommunications. The conference had over 1000 attendee's from nearly every country. This conference combines instructional design theories with real work applications, making it one of the few conferences that have a good balance of ideas and workable solutions.
At the conference I presented a short paper that outlined the development process we have been using to produce our distance learning courses. As you may know, we use a team approach to our software development as well as the distance learning courses. Jefferson is one of a few schools that have combined its knowledge creation, management and preservation into a combined unit, AISR. Education Services includes team members with graduate degree's in instructional design, educational technology, information science, computer science, and a gifted artist. Members of our staff team with a faculty content expert to develop instructional materials for use in the classroom as well as online or via media like CD-ROM's. During the question and answer part of the presentation developers at other schools were surprised about the development time and costs reported. I was worried they were going to tell me it wasn't taking them as long to produce their materials. Quite the opposite in fact, similar and even smaller projects were taking significantly greater development time and higher costs than our model. I attribute our ability to produce not only the number of programs we do each year, but their quality to the great staff I have!
Some of the more interesting sessions (besides my own of course) are detailed below.
NASA & Science Education
An instructional design masters student presented his thesis and detailed his internship work with NASA. Long an avid science fiction fan, and NASA supporter, I attended this session more for personal interest than direct application to work we're doing at AISR. Science faculty, as well as armature scientist and hobbyist may benefit from the number of educational materials NASA has produced recently. Initially intended for use in the K-12 schools to encourage student's interest in science, NASA has produced self-paced instructional material on a wide number of subjects. For teachers, suggestions for their use in the classroom as well as additional activities, and comments by teachers who have used the materials are available on the various NASA servers. Star charts, reports and images from the Mars and Jupiter orbiters are online.
GuideBot
The guidebot is an artificial intelligence agent used to work with students in simulations and case studies. The guidebot agent can be used as a coach to help students work through problems in a simulation or case study that would be too expensive or too dangerous to do live. Examples presented included working on a large ship when there is an engine failure. If the student is unsure of the next step to take, the guidebot can, if asked, offer suggestions. There may be more than one guidebot running in the same simulations, so the virtual reality space is populated with guidebots manning the other helm stations and they react differently based on what actions the student takes. The guidebot uses a synthesized voice, which I thought sounded too artificial. However the developers said voice recognition/synthesis software was improving at a fast rate and they were confident it would soon be much more realistic. Because the guidebot does not have a fixed path, they are not able to sample and play back pre-recorded audio.
TrailMaker
This is a tool that allows an instructor to build a set of annotated WebPages that present a lesson or a story. The twist is that the WebPages themselves come from other sites. I think it's easiest to imagine a saved, replayable, guided tour through the Web on a specific subject. This program was very controversial for the audience as, understandably, developers took issue with others "pre-packaging" material not created by then. This presentation could be made by an instructor to teach a lesson and demonstrate examples. It could also be done by students to present a topic they researched themselves or as a group. The presenter, unfortunately a grad-student who didn't have the backup support from a faculty advisor that she should have, was only able to say they saw the process and its use beneficial as an educational lesson. I don't think the audience doubted that, just that it came pretty close to questionable fair use guidelines. By the way, speaking of Fair Use Guidelines, AISR has sent out letters to all faculty about the University's interpretation and its implications for putting items on "Reserve" (either with the circulation desk as has traditionally been done, or electronically in your online course.)
Online Course Tools
There was also plenty of discussions about the different course website tools becoming available. Institutions varied on whether they felt it best to develop their own materials in house or to go with a commercially available package. This topic is not new to Jefferson. For the past few years AISR has taken a look at the available tools annually. Each year we felt we could do a better job in-house... until this year. In this year's analysis we felt Blackboard's CourseInfo product included appropriate features and presented them in a way that was easy for both faculty and students to use. Commercial programs like CourseInfo were referred to as "course wrappers" in several presentations. The general consensus was the two leading products are CourseInfo and WebCT.
Though both products are relatively easy to use, they provide categories to organize instructional content; they don't force the development of GOOD material. For that you need a skilled teacher. Some teachers are just born great, natural presenters that are gifted just like a musician or a scientist can be. The rest of us know what we want to teach, just not how best to reach some of our students. Or we may enjoy a great relationship with our students, but feel we're not helping the top students really achieve all that they could. When we recognize this, we know to look for help. Faculty development seminars, journals, books are all great sources, as are other teachers, perhaps those that made us want to go into teaching. As a faculty member at Jefferson, you are freely able to consult with one of Education Services instructional designers. These consultations can be private one-on-one sessions, or we can prepare a workshop for the entire faculty in your department. If you would like to discuss this service, please contact me.
Related Links:
|
