Instructional Design - Links

The foundation of a great course is great instructional design.
Here are a few sites which will walk over the basics and provide you with some models which can help you frame your process.

• Instructional Design Central
• Instructional Objectives and Tests
• Instructional Design Models

While these sites aren't "glitzy" - they provide good foundations in the principles and practices.

Plagiarism: Preventing or Punishing?

Last year I stumbled across a great set of presentations from Douglas Johnson who serves as the Director of Media and Technology for Mankato Public Schools in Minnesota. As we leverage online classes as a strategy to serve a broader market of students, faculty raise more frequent concerns about academic misconduct and plagiarism.

Of particular interest is a presentation titled "The Fence or the Ambulance: Are You Punishing or Preventing Plagiarism in Your School?" When you view the handout he has posted online you will see Doug's Qualities of LPP (Low Probability of Plagiarism) guidelines.
Here is the list:

1. LPP projects have clarity of purpose and expectations.
2. LPP research projects give students choices.
3. LPP projects are relevant to the student's life.
4. LPP projects ask students to write in a narrative rather than an expository style.
5. LPP projects stress higher level thinking skills and creativity.
6. LPP projects answer real questions (which students would ask).
7. LPP projects involve a variety of information finding activities.
8. LPP projects tend to be hands-on.
9. LPP projects use technology to spur creativity.
10. LPP projects use formats that use multiple senses.
11. LPP projects can be complex, but are broken into multiple steps.
12. LPP projects are often collaborative and produce results that are better than individual work.
13. LPP projects have results that are shared with people who care and respond.
14. LPP projects are authentically assessed.
15. LPP projects allow the learner to reflect, revisit, revise, and improve their final projects.
16. LPP projects are encouraged by adults who believe that given enough time, resources, and motivation, all students are capable of original work.

Each of these points is accompanied by a paragraph which gives context and strategies.

The presentation handout then goes on to present grading rubrics and assignment instructions which would be delivered to students.

Doug provides some excellent strategies to ensure that students have a genuine and meaningful experience in authoring their works by incorporating the student's own interests and goals into the assignments. Also - pacing is used - so that students are responsible for delivering components along the timeline (rather than a complete and finished work at the moment of deadline).

Concept-Mapping Presentations - Free for Educators!

Normally at conferences I’m already “up” on most of the Web 2.0 tools being shown, but last year I was happily surprised to learn about a new one from Prezi.com.

Prezi allows you to create more dynamic presentations, with the great application of doing “mind maps” which allow users to drill down into details. Users can zoom in and out of a presentation, or they can follow the predefined "path" you have created for the presentation.

Last year - I played around with the Web 2.0 application and created a quick “Student Readiness for Online” presentation. With only a few minutes of orientation - I was able to create the following presentation:

The result is at: http://prezi.com/134940/

Use the arrow keys in the bottom of the screen to navigate, or simply click your mouse on an object to "zoom into" that object, and use the mouse scroll wheel to control the zoom aspect (bigger / smaller).

The site provides free accounts which include 100MB of file storage (which is plenty of file space since text-based presentations take up very little storage space). Educators with a ".edu" email address can get a 500MB free account. Commercial accounts are also sold for a very reasonable annual cost. Even with the free site you can download your presentation to a ZIP package which includes your presentation as an Adobe Flash application (so you can off-load your content and use it without connection to the internet).

In online courses, I would prefer this style of presentation over PowerPoint for many types of information. The ability to scale size of each object allows you to "hide details" deep inside of other objects and text - and yet, you can create a "path" which brings all the information into full view. I also like the concept map as a means of showing relationships and interconnecting processes.

Since it is a free tool – it would be useful for faculty and students alike.

SkyDrive by Microsoft - Store Files in the Cloud

Microsoft is offering 25GB of free online web storage in their Live.Com accounts. The space is called Skydrive, and you can set each folder to different permissions (private, public, networked friends, specific email addresses).

This might be a great way to distribute self-generated media to students without all the extra hassles and delays associated with posting content on a campus web server. Also - the site handles the login / password authentication for you -- making the distribution as easy as setting up a list of email addresses which can access the content.

There also are public folders which allow anyone with the correct (and "obfuscated") URL to get directly to a file. This allows you to multi-purpose the content which you develop - so that you can use the materials in your course site, in your professional credential eFolio, and also in your other online social-networking sites.

Welcome to the New CTL Faculty Roundtable Blog!

At the urging of some system faculty, we created a new blog--CTL Faculty Roundtable--as a forum to bring together all the rich contributions of faculty about teaching and learning within the Minnesota State Colleges and Universities system.

Here's your opportunity to share your recommended practices, what to watch out for, and what makes teaching tick. Make this site YOUR site.

CTL Staff