Once a course or lesson has been installed and is in process, the design takes over. Students and teacher (if there is one) and materials and the design rock back and forth and interact with each other in a ‘response…
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Once a course or lesson you have designed is over, you will need to look into the mirror of an end evaluation (activity 1). You will need to validate the quality of your own design decision-making. This end evaluation is…
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The usual long, hot summer. In Townville, Illinois, manager Joseph D Doe of the Buy-It-Here supermarket chain is getting hot under the collar. For the sixth time in three days he is listening to another complaint from one of his…
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Every freshly made course or lesson is unique. It carries the fingerprint of its designer’s design decision-making. The last convolutions in the print come from decisions made as you test-and-revise (activity 4.3) a thought-up, worked-out design. The test is made…
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In the developmental testing of a design, you are testing for the unexpected: for unexpected wrong responses, unexpected interfering responses and unexpected attitudes of learner and teacher (if one is involved). These things are ‘unexpected’ because with the help of…
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Learners can like being told what to do. ‘Think aloud’, Draw a diagram’, ‘Talk to yourself about….. ‘Label this picture’, ‘Explain this to….. ‘Match the items in List A with those in list B’, ‘Conjure up a mental picture of….’Explain…
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Learners like to know where they are going. They need some navigational aid (verbal or visual) at the very start of the course or lesson which maps out, or hints at, the response route they are going to take. In…
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‘Nice’, ‘good’, ‘beautiful’, ‘exciting’, but remaining for ever gathering dust in its worked-out form on the designer’s shelf: this is sometimes the fate of a good design.
An S-R event in which the primary goal is `to instruct’ has a sharp, business-like sound to it. It has to deliver some pre-defined knowledge or skill. In contrast, an S-B, event which is an ‘encounter’ gives the learner plenty…
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How many times as a teacher or designer have you heard the complaint that the separate parts of a course ‘don’t seem to belong to each other’? You have probably had to respond to the complaint of non-integration in a…
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