Saturday's featured presentation was by Wade Ellis, a Mathematics Instructor from West Valley College. Ellis is very passionate about the need to have sound instructional design in college courses. He thinks the instructional design around technology is largely missing, stating that “The learning object is not the learning activity.”
He touched on various research that he believes instructors should take into account when planning course objectives and class activities, including Bloom's Taxonomy, reflective learning, and Malcom Knowles' assumptions about the design of learning for adult learners.
Ellis noted that many people will find a learning object in a repository and say “we’ll show it the next day” without giving enough thought into how to use it to further student learning. (I would add that in some cases even an object's creator might do the same thing).
He then set up an example from math that illustrated several of his points. According to the Action/Consequence/Reflection Principle (Tom Dick and Gail Burrill), students act on mathematical objects, transparently observe the consequences of their actions, and then reflect on the mathematical meaning of those consequences.
He showed us an interactive tool the illustrates the slope of a line. An instructor could should show that to a class and explain how changing coordinates affects the slope. Instead, he said, it would be much better to develop inquiry questions and have students experiment with it.
There was really not a lot of new information in his presentation. Bloom's taxonomy, for example, has been around since the late 1950s. However, I agree with him that instructional design is often overlooked, and evolving technology adds challenges. As an instructional designer myself, I enjoyed listening to a professor with such a passion for ID!
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