Week 1 Learning Experiences: Preview

Our task for week one in the course is threefold, and asks us to identify areas we will research through a Community of Practitioners:

  • one new skill or competency related to instructional design 
  • one learning trend from 2017
  • two learning or instructional theories 
I think this is a great opportunity to research some things I have been interested in but have not been able to dedicate time to researching as projects in their own right.

For almost two years I have been interested in Open Educational Resources (OER), and have been exploring some of the options on the market.  This is in large part an outgrowth of my own teaching, as I increasingly have developed videos, modules, and other learning materials to supplement the textbooks where I found the student engagement was lacking in the materials traditionally provided by vendors.  TopHat, a vendor that works with the OER group OpenStax.org, has even contacted me over the years to incorporate my materials into their OER resources.  So my new skill/competency to research is the OER market and how to go about building and distributing OER resources.

I have some experience developing augmented and virtual reality materials for courses and museums, and a natural outgrowth from that has been an interest in gamification in education.  In the past I developed simulations for the Jacksonian America and Civil War time periods for use in the classroom, which were very popular with students.  I am interested in converting these to online activities or even apps.  The 2017 learning trend I am going to focus on is gaming and simulation.

Finally, there are many learning or instructional theories that are worth exploring in depth, but I have chosen Gamification in Education (to parallel the trend for research) and the Component Display Theory by David Merrill.  At this point, I cannot say that I understand or can explain the Component Display Theory, although I think it shows potential for being applicable in history courses or even in how we incorporate educational content into games.  I could be completely wrong here, but it's worth reading in more detail to learn about this theory!

My goals for week 1 are to:

Thanks for joining me on the journey!

Comments

  1. RaleneCreatesSeptember 22, 2017 at 7:11 PM

    Great information. Love where you're going with your blog. I'm sure this will be a fun and innovative approach for learning in this class. Thanks for sharing.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Jessica CannonSeptember 22, 2017 at 9:11 PM

      Thanks Ralene! I hope the resources are helpful for others. It has been a good way to reflect and keep track of progress while working the research into life.

      Delete

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