October 2016 – MSc in Applied eLearning

M2-Week 1-Home

Instructional Design & eAuthoring Module (Week 1)

The following is a reflection on the week immediately after the class that took place on Tuesday 25th October 2016 using Gibbs Reflective Cycle.

Description

I set up a group on WhatsApp for The Compostivists and invited Allesio Gemma, Michael McKeever and Rachel Maguire to join the group. I think that it is important to use instant messaging if we want our group to be efficient and effective in its work over the coming weeks.

On Saturday 29th October 2016, our group had its first meeting (F2F) in the Westbury Hotel, Dublin 2.

Feelings

It was a productive and happy meeting as can be seen from this photograph:

photo_01-1 — The Compostivists: Allesio Gemma, Gerard Kilkenny, Mick McKeever, Rachel Maguire.

Evaluation

Here are the minutes of the first meeting of The Compostivists:

Group Members: Allesio Gemma, Gerard Kilkenny, Michael McKeever, Rachel Maguire

Group Project: Composting

Meeting 1 (Date): Saturday 29^th October 2016

Meeting 1 (Location): Westbury Hotel, Dublin 2

The following areas of composting will be considered in developing the group’s Instructional Design / eAuthoring project:

Why compost
What to compost
How to compost
Where to compost (school, house, apartment, etc)
Science of composting
Economics of composting
Best practice composting
Duration of composting
Composting versus ‘Black Bin’
How composting influences retail purchasing choices for the consumer

The group made the following decisions:

The group name will be ‘The Compostivists’
Allesio will email the group with a photo of the group taken at this meeting using Allesio’s camera phone.
Communication methods will include email, Whats App, face to face meetings.
Mick McKeever will ask Dolores McManus to set up a virtual class for the group in DIT’s Blackboad LMS so that the group can use file sharing, chat, etc.

The group decided to assign the following roles to group members and to organise the group’s work as follows:

Subject Matter Expert (SME):   Michael McKeever
Storyboarder:                              Allesio Gemma
Storyboarder:                              Rachel Maguire
Authoring Tools Specialist:       Gerard Kilkenny

See the following links in relation to the make-up of an eLearning team:

http://elearninguncovered.com/2013/07/e-learning-production-roles/
http://theelearningcoach.com/elearning_design/starting-an-elearning-department/
https://elearningindustry.com/elearning-dream-team-key-players

All members of the group will also have an instructional design role. Articulate Storyline will be used for storyboarding and Adobe Captivate will be used for authoring.

The next group meeting will be in DIT, Kevin Street at 11 am on Saturday 12^th November 2016.

Analysis

This was a good first meeting for our group. We decided how the group’s work would be shared out and what roles individuals within the group would have. It is good that we now have a list of areas to be considered for the composting lesson.

Conclusions

The group decided to wait for two weeks to meet again as it will take at least that amount of time for Allesio and Rachel to create the first iteration of the storyboard.

Personal Action Plans

Now that I have located user guides and video tutorials for Adobe Captivate 9, begin the process of learning to use the different features of this tool.
Read the following book chapter with a view to writing an annotated bibliography of it. This chapter will also inform the development of the eLearning resource using Adobe Captivate 9.

Clark, R. C., & Mayer, R. E. (2011) Applying the Contiguity Principle. In Clark, R. C., & Mayer, R. E., E-learning and the science of instruction: Proven guidelines for consumers and designers of multimedia learning. San Francisco, CA: Pfeiffer.

M2-Week 1-Class

Instructional Design & eAuthoring Module (Week 1)

The following is a reflection on the Tuesday morning class that took place on 25th October 2016 from 10:00 to 13:00 using Gibbs Reflective Cycle.

Description

The aim of the module is for the students to gain competence in planning, designing and developing eLearning resources/activities. The assessment consists of four items as follows:

(1) Storyboard (Group)
(2) The e-learning resource/activity ) (Group)
(3) Annotated bibliography (Individual)
(4) 1000 word reflection (Individual)

Later in the class, we were divided into three groups. My group consists of four students as follows: Allessio Gemma, Michael McKeever, Rachel Maguire and myself (Gerard Kilkenny). We decided that the eLearning resource we will develop will be based on composting. We decided to adopt the name The Compostivists for our group.

Feelings

It wasn’t too dramatic a change to move to a computer room (Room 2069) on the second floor of DIT Aungier Street. For the first five weeks of the course (the Learning Theories module), the MSc and MA students were together in the LTTC Teaching Rooms on the fifth floor. Now that the MSc and MA groups are separated for Module 2, it has now become apparent that there are 11 students following the MSc Applied eLearning degree course. My group The Compostivists have already schedule its first meeting for this Saturday 29th October 2016 in the Westbury Hotel, Dublin 2. I volunteered to carry out the development work for the eLearning resource (using Adobe Captivate) and Allesio signalled an interest in taking the lead on creating a storyboard for the resource. I have a feeling that our group will work well together.

Evaluation

It was helpful that the lecturers on this module (Damian Gordon and Pauline Rooney) outlined how the module is to be assessed, and what is expected of the students, from the outset. I discovered that I already have one of the books on the Essential Reading List:

Clark, R. C., & Mayer, R. E. (2011). E-learning and the science of instruction: Proven guidelines for consumers and designers of multimedia learning. San Francisco, CA: Pfeiffer.

I began reading this book about a year ago before I applied for the MSc Applied eLearning course.

Damian showed the class how useful the Cite button in Google Scholar can be. I hadn’t used Google Scholar before now but I hope to make good use of it in the weeks ahead.

Analysis

My initial analysis was that the assessment for Module 2 (Instructional Design) is much more demanding than for Module 1 (Learning Theories). Module 2 has four assessment tasks compared to one assessment task for Module 1. Moreover, Module 2 takes place over eight weeks with 10 ECTS to be gained whereas Module 1 took place over five weeks and had only 5 ECTS attached to it. However, on closer analysis the four assessment items appear to be very integrated. The storyboard precedes the development of the eLearning resource and the annotated bibliographies inform both of these items. The 1000 word reflection is a meta-reflection of all of the individual reflections and this is something to be carried out at the end of the module.

Conclusions

I think that I am going to very much enjoy this module as I am very interested in, and have prior experience of, developing eLearning resources. It will be important to carefully schedule the work required for this module in order to meet the deadlines for the assessment tasks. In relation to the annotated bibliographies (5 to 7 to be done), Damian advised us to properly critique our annotations and to say if they were useful for our group project. There should be three parts to each annotation: summary, critique, evaluation.

Personal Action Plans

Locate user guides and video tutorials for Adobe Captivate 9
Source some of the eleven books on the Essential Reading list.

M1-Week 5-Home

This week I continued to work on my learning theories paper, which was due to be submitted via SafeAssign on Webcourses on 23rd October 2016. The title of my paper is:

The van Hiele Model and Learning Theories: Implications for Teaching and Learning Geometry

M1-Week 5-Class

Earlier in the week, each student had to prepare a work-in-progress for today’s Learning Theories class. Here is the text I prepared during the week:

Learning Theories Module – Paper 1 (Work-in-Progress Presentation)

Van Hiele Model – A theory that describes how students learn geometry

by Gerard Kilkenny

00 – Introduction (300 Words)

The purpose of this paper is to examine how the van Hiele model can be used as a framework in the teaching and learning of geometry to Junior Cycle Maths students. It goes on to explore how elements of the classical learning theories of cognitivism and constructivism are embedded in the van Hiele theory. In particular, it provides a comparative analysis of the Van Hiele model wih the theoretical learning frameworks of Gagne, Piaget, Bruner and Vygotsky. The concluding section discusses possible implications of the Van Hiele model for eLearning design.

10 – Van Hiele Model (The 5 Levels) (480 Words)

Level 1 (Visualisation), Level 2 (Analysis) Level 3 (Abstraction), Level 4 (Deduction), Level 5 (Rigour).

20 – Van Hiele Model (The 4 Properties) (110 Words)

Property 1 (Fixed Sequence), Property 2 (Adjacency), Property 3 (Distinction), Property 4 (Separation).

30 – Van Hiele Model (The 5 Phases) (180 Words)

Phase 1 (Inquiry), Phase 2 (Directed Orientation), Phase 3 (Explanation), Phase 4 (Free Orientation), Phase 5 (Integration)

40 – The Gagne Van Hiele Connection

Gagné et al (1992, p.44) list “verbal information” as one of the “five kinds of learned capabilities” (R-40, p.44) and this can perhaps be mapped to van Hiele’s Level 0 where “the student can learn names of figures…” (Usiskin, 1982, p.4). Similarly, the capability of identifying the diagonal of a rectangle is provided as an example of the capability “intellectual skill” by Gagné et al (1992, p.44) (R-40, p.44) which appears to have it’s equivalent in van Hiele’s Level 1 where students can understand that “rectangles have four right angles” (Hoffer, 1979, 1981) or that a rectangle “has two equal diagonals” (The Project Maths Development Team, 2014, p.32).

50 – Van Hiele and Piaget

Piaget (1953) (R-50) argues that children do not enter the formal operational stage until they are 14 years of age and that they cannot learn formal proofs before this period. Van Hiele (1985) (R-51) describes similar properties in his penultimate geometric level deduction although he does not specify which age pupils reach this level. In Irish secondary schools, students generally don’t study formal proofs in geometry until second or third year when they are approximately 14 years old. (R-04)

60 – Van Hiele, Vygotsky and Bruner

Van Hiele questioned the notions of growth being linked with biological maturation. Instead, in ways that have much in common with Vygotsky (1978), he saw development in terms of students’ confrontation with the cultural environment, their own exploration, and their reaction to a guided learning process. (p.112)

70 – Neuroscience and Teaching

What can neuroscience teach us about teaching? (Dr. William O’Connor)

http://icep.ie/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/What-can-neuroscience-teach-us-about-teaching.pdf

80 – Implications for ICT and Instructional Design

Book (Principles of Instructional Design), Book (Michael Allen’s Guide to e-Learning) Software (GeoGebra).

Key References

Curran, S. (2014). Is The Van Hiele Model Useful in Determining How Children Learn Geometry? Munich: GRIN.

Gagné, R. M., Briggs, L. J., & Wager, W. W. (1992). Principles of Instructional Design. Fort Worth: Harcourt.

Piaget, J. (1953). The Origin of Intelligence in the Child. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.

Project Maths Development Team (2015). Teacher Handbook First Year. Retrieved September 25, 2016, from http://www.projectmaths.ie/documents/handbooks/firstyearhandbook2015.pdf

Usiskin, Z (1982). Van Hiele Levels and Achievement in Secondary School Geometry. University of Chicago

Yazdani, M. A. (2008). The Gagne – van Hieles Connection: A Comparative Analysis of Two Theoretical Learning Frameworks. Journal of Mathematical Sciences & Mathematics Education, 3(1), 58-63.

M1-Week 4-Home

Here is the text I prepared, as required, on a single A4 page for Week 5 of the Learning Theories module on 11th October 2016: