Three things I learned from Eduflow's Instructional Design Principles course
Rachna Ghiya
Articulate Storyline Developer | Freelance eLearning Developer | eLearning Designer | eLearning Video Producer | Making Visuals @a_little_pause
As a transitioning Instructional Designer, I am always looking for opportunities that would make me practically apply my ID knowledge. And one of the opportunities came in the form of the Eduflow course on Instructional Design Principles.?
It is a free cohort-based course where one gets to learn ID principles and apply them to create a learning experience. This three-week boot camp offers structured learning and the possibility to engage with other fellow learners and facilitators. We also had workshops by Luke Hobson and Heidi Kirby and a few networking meetups along with office hours to discuss our assignments with peers.?
Here are three new things that I learned from this course:
Giving Feedback
One of the unique features of this course is peer-reviewed assessments. It provided a great opportunity to see how other members of the cohort are thinking and approaching their assignments. And this automatically created a space for shared learning.?
As this is a cohort-based course with peer-reviewed assessments, this course taught me how to provide valuable feedback by adhering to four pillars of good feedback - Constructive, Specific, Justified, and Kind.?
I acknowledge that being able to give and receive feedback is an important skill as a lifelong learner. I learned a lot about giving feedback and reflecting on the feedback given to me. I realized how important it is for the facilitator to ensure that the reviewer knows the parameters to consider while reviewing an assessment. And this could be achieved in two ways: feedback rubric?and clearly writing feedback questions (along with clear answer choices and an example of good feedback for that section).
After providing feedback, my peers reflected on how many of the pillars of good feedback I used (from the four pillars). This became a feedback quality score which gave me a metric to evaluate my feedback effectiveness.?
Focusing Objectives and more ...
Eduflow's course provided me with a deeper understanding of instructional objectives with?this?article by Will Thalheimer.?
Will, in his article, introduced a term, "focusing objectives", that he defines as instructional objectives—presented to learners before subsequent learning- to focus learner attention on critical learning material. He mentions an experiment that tells the positive impact of focusing objectives (provided to learners) on the performance of the material related to the objectives v/s the material not related to the objectives.
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He also says that one can be as creative as one wants and need not necessarily use focusing objectives to focus their learner's attention. A good, relevant, gripping story or a shout-out can equally work.
He has also written about various kinds of instructional objectives that can be written for learners and instructional designers.?
Tools & Platforms
I got to know various tools & platforms. Some were used for the course creation while others were introduced by the facilitators :?
Padlet?- It's a real-time collaborative web platform. We used it to share examples of formative and summative assessments and various other collaborative activities.
Tella?- It's a tool for screen and camera recording. There is a free version that allows recording up to 10 videos (with a watermark).
Gather?- It's a video chat platform designed to make virtual interactions more human. I haven't tried it yet.?Luke Hobson?introduced this during his workshop on Backwards Design.?
Eduflow LMS?- This course is hosted on Eduflow LMS. I like Eduflow's UI & UX and peer-review system.?
I am a part of Cohort 6 and am currently in the third week. And I am enjoying this learning experience. I am yet to complete the third assessment and go over a few of the workshop recordings. I would like to thank William Cronje, Terra van der Lugt and the Eduflow team for curating this course.
Wish to be a part of this course? Here is the link to?apply?for the next cohort. ?I got selected in the second application, so keep applying in case you didn't get selected the first time.
I hope you got to know something new by reading this article. Share something that you have learned recently. I would love to hear from you :)
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Training & Support Specialist | Curriculum Designer | Professional Development Leader | STEM Program Facilitator | Experienced Virtual and Classroom Presenter | Program Onboarding
10 个月I agree with your key ideas and take aways from the course. Thank you for sharing.