Day 3, Fundamentaler

This week’s class covered some more systematic ways to look at designing technology for education, including the ADDIE method for design and evaluation and Bloom’s taxonomy.

The ADDIE method is a complement to the ABCD(E) method we’d learned earlier, as it covers the process of creating the instructional element itself. It goes as follows:

Assessment: You must assess the needs and the conditions – this is largely covered in the ABCD(E)s.
Design: The actual design of the product, as a result of your assessment.
Development: The production of your material.
Implementation: Putting your material into practice
Evaluation: Compile the results and determine the effectiveness of your material.

It’s very basic, but it’s a great outline to follow during the process of creating these things. I’ve done some of this in the past, I just didn’t know I was following these steps (and, sometimes, I wasn’t following all of them). In my HCI class this quarter, I will likely fall back on these steps when we’re producing our iPhone app, since that will follow the same lines, even though it’s not specifically for education.

Bloom’s taxonomy is largely helpful in the last step, the evaluation of the effectiveness in educating the participants of the training. Bloom split the dimensions of learning into three categories:

Cognitive: being able to reason with the material, knowing the concepts (ie I know that 2+2=4)
Effective: emotional learning, the attitude that a participant possesses about the material or the subject (I am good at math!)
Psycho-motor: the physical/motor skills that a participant has following the training. (I was so good at math that I became a pilot and I can land a plane)

Professor Kim argued that a fourth, Social Learning, could be added to talk about their ability to pass on the information to another person.

When a piece of training is evaluated on these concepts, rather than simply the stated objectives (which may, or may not, follow the same lines), you get a better idea on the entirety of it’s effectiveness. If a student is learning the psycho-motor and cognitive skills, but has little self-efficacy in the effective dimension, then the training may still not produce the desired result.

Using these, and the things we’ve talked about so far, we met in four groups to design and propose a learning solution for a given situation. I thought the activity was a bit sudden and I wasn’t entirely sure on what we were expected to do – whether he wanted just an ABCD analysis of the situation, or he wanted an actual product design, or even how much time we had to finish it. In the end, however, I think the activity was still helpful, as it allowed an application of these concepts while they were fresh.

We have our first artifact due in a couple days, so I am current researching and compiling resources and organizations that work with homeless adults to provide job skill training, and I look forward to presenting that to the class on Wednesday.