I am blown away by the amount of knowledge that we are gaining this week. How I wish that I had know 1/10th of this when I started teaching!!! I must admit that chapter 4 was a little overwhelming for me. As I was reading....I kept thinking about my project and thinking.....I will be doing this for the next 3 months :-) The example about the PB & J sandwich was helpful and funny all at once. It reminded me of an activity that was used while I was in middle school. The teacher had all of the supplies and then asked a student to tell them step-by-step what to do to make the sandwich. They allowed 2-3 students to attempt to give instructions, but the sandwich always ended up to be a disaster b/c the teacher would only do EXACTLY what they were told, much like the example in the text. This activity stuck with me and I use it to illustrate to students that when preparing a plan of care that will be passed on to the next nurse, they can not assume anything....write it in clear, specific terms. Why would anything less be expected of educator attempting to prepare a plan to teach students new material?
Chapter 5 is an invaluable tool. The boxes with lists of applicable verbs for specific types of objectives and the many, many examples have helped me to finally understand the objective writing process. No longer is it an abstract concept that I try to understand. I now feel that I will be able to write clear objectives for my project if only at the novice level. I have placed many tabs over these pages to refer to for my design project and for future reference in planning objectives and teaching strategies!!!! I am again reminded of the nursing process. We stress the need for observable, measurable goal statements (the objectives) with specific interventions (teaching strategies) to meet this goal. There is also distinction between short-term and long-term goals.
The decision on how to sequence material has been bouncing all over in my brain since I first began plotting an online course. How do I decide how many modules to have?? How do I decide what belongs in the modules??? And, how do I decide what order to put the modules in???? Chapters 5 and 6 have been particularly helpful with these types of decisions. I feel like the learning-related sequencing may be great for my project. One reason why I like it is that it fits with so many of the learning theories that we have been studying in the sense that it is very student-centered. How would the student like to have the material presented? Starting the course with a topic that students will be interested in, like resume building will probably attain higher levels of enthusiam than starting with a unit in nursing law.
Chapter 7 has helped me to understand that there is more than one step that must be planned for each objective. I think that in the past I may have failed to fully consider the initial presentation ahead of time. Initial presentations of pictures or samples reinforce what I have read in the Bonk and Zhang text regarding the importance of providing sample documents for students. I have done some of this in the past, but I had never really thought about why it is important to do so. I must admit that in this chapter I started to feel a little overwhelmed again when trying to conceptualize how my objective would fit into the expanded performance-content matrix and what prescription to use. It is amazing the amount of thought and effort put into even the simplest learning objective.
