LTEC 5110 - Curriculum Design and Instructional Resources

Sounds According to Alten (2002) sound is described as “vibrations that set into motion longitudinal waves of compression and rarefaction propagated through molecular structures such as gas, liquids, and solids” (p. 14).  Audio is the second most distributed medium of instructions, with text been first (Unwin & McAleese, 1988). How do you think the use of audio-only instruction will benefit teaching and learning? There are so many positives when it comes to using audio-only instruction.  Audio content is mobile friendly.  Learners can download the audio content to a CD, flash drive, smartphone, and iPads and play the recording anywhere, including in their car while driving to a vacation destination.  Audio files can also be managed easily, rewinding them or fast wording them as one chooses.  Audio files can also be used very effectively to teach someone a new language.  It allows the learner to do proper words pronunciation, something that text ba...

What have you learned thus far about designing instruction from a multiple media perspective? How do you think the use of visual-text instruction will benefit teaching and learning? What do you think will be potential issues with the use of visual-text instruction? How do you think it will impact your teaching and learning? What do you think is better about using both images and text? What not? How do you feel about using multiple forms of media instead of a single medium for delivering instruction? After working in InDesign this week, I feel like there so much in this program to learn.  This program can be a little intimidating at first as there are so many options and tools.  This program is a very powerful application which allows for the creation of very nice looking instructional material.  I think InDesign is perfect for designing content with both images and text as it provides a lot more freedom to do different kinds of layouts.  Other applications like ...

What is different about developing instruction with both images and text combined? Is it more efficient? Do you think about how you instruct someone differently? Are there limitations? Benefits? If so, what are they For this week’s assignment, our project changed from using image only instructions to a combination of multimedia, using images and text.  We also switched to another program, this week it was InDesign.  I am new to InDesign and I don’t know if the quick tutorials were enough for me to feel comfortable with all of my work, but I tried my best.  I’m glad I learn a new application and hope to put it to good use doing instructional material at work.  I will just need to come back and finished watching all the other tutorials. With the combination of images and text, my layout changed from the previous week.  Although at first, I wanted to include an image next to each step, I felt some steps were easy enough and descriptive enough that they didn’t n...

Reflect on what you have come to understand about the design of instruction that primarily or exclusively employs a single media such as graphics to teach. What did you learn about designing instruction from a single media perspective? What are its limitations? How is it beneficial? How can/will you use it for teaching and learning in the future?   What are the limits to the use of media in general for learning and teaching? If Clark is correct, why do we bother? How did this perspective change the way you think about learning and teaching? For week four, our project changed from text-based instructions to using only visual images.  After reading the instructions and looking at the examples, I thought I had this assignment figured out but that was not the case.  Although I’m fairly familiar with Photoshop, I had to start and re-start my Photoshop documents a few times because I accidentally skipped a design step or because I had to remove a step.  Even after dra...

On week three, we covered color theory and visual design.  I really enjoyed this week’s reading content.  Some of it was familiar to me as I took a color theory class many years ago, during my undergrad course work but some of the content was new to me or I had forgotten all about it.  I have to say that I just find it fascinating that Sir Isaac Newton, a physicist, created the first color wheel.  How great is that? Color theory is a system of rules and guidance for mixing various colors for creating aesthetically pleasing content. Because color and the visual design of documents are a very powerful visual communication tool, it is extremely important for those who create instructional material to be mindful of their use.  For example, color can produce feelings such as happiness or sadness.  It can also imply associations like for example, red and white might be associated with Christmas, while black and orange are associated with Halloween (Schwertly, ...

Our activities for this week were on the topic of text and hypertext .  Our assignments required that we use only text or hypertext on our instruction set.  I really enjoyed all of the assignments for this week.  At work, part of my duties require that I create short, step-by-step instructions that the faculty or students can use to learn a simple task for a new software or application.  For very short instructions (half a page of less), I typically try to use simple text and limit the use of hypertext.  I do so when I want the user to focus on the simple task at hand.  Although I have not had professional training for developing instruction sets, I based my designs purely on the feedback I receive from my users. I don’t necessary think that using text-only format on an instruction set hurts or helps explain a subject matter.  I think deciding which format to use will depend on how easy or difficult it is to explain the topic.  If images or v...

Reflect on the following: What do you think you already know about the use of media for learning and teaching?  Discuss some examples of instances in which you have used media to teach or learn personally and how effective you found it to be.  I have done application/software training off and on for over 15 years. I’ve done workshops for PowerPoint, Excel, Access, Word, Outlook, ExamSoft, Blackboard, Photoshop, etc. Sometimes the training/workshops can go very smoothly and sometimes not so much. I remember my worst experience, it was a workshop for MS Access. My first mistake was agreeing to teach Access since it is not an easy software to understand or to teach, and my second mistake was offering it as a hands-on training for a large group. I quickly became aware that things were not going to go so well when I realized some users were not comfortable with the computer and didn’t know the difference between a right-click, a double-click, or a triple-click. Needles...

I just started my second semester for my masters’ program at UNT.  I was hesitant at registering for summer courses because I have a lot of home and work projects going on, including the replacement of all the windows at my house.  I need to learn to prioritize what’s most important and not take on so many projects.  I’m nervous about taking two summer courses because the courses are short but full of reading content and assignments.  For the first week of class, I have 12 assignments do.  I need to organize my week’s calendar so that I can complete all assignments on time.  Yesterday, I worked on creating my weekly folders and subfolders so that I can begin my semester in a more organized way than I did last semester.  There other tools that I want to use to keep track of my reading assignments, etc. This week’s reading assignments include topics: ADDIE ID (Gustafson, Branch)  Computer Mediated Communication (Romiszowski, Mason)  De...