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Week 15/16, 3 - Final Blog


What have you learned in the course about designing instruction from a multimedia perspective?

We have reached the end of this summer class and I am relieved.  This class was loaded with content and assignments and from week one, I knew I would have to organize my time well to make sure I kept up with the workload.  I have learned a lot from this class.  It has so far been the one class that has introduced me to designing instruction sets.  Although this class had so many parts to the project and we used multiple media programs, I am glad is done and my projects are complete. 

I have learned a lot of theory as well as multiple applications.  The biggest lesson I take from this class is to stick with the project, even if it seems daunting and to be proud of the work I have produced.  From the readings I learned that sometimes using too many media applications to teach a topic can be redundant and overload the learner.  As Clark (1983) suggested, “it is the students' perception or attributions of the medium and their own abilities that are thought to be causally connected to the effort they invest, not the medium per se.”

How would designing instruction be different from a constructivist perspective, based on what you read? Would it?

When creating instructional content from a constructivist perspective, the learning content needs to be presented in a way that systematically builds learning through the student’s previous experiences (scaffolding).  Very similar to the projects we worked on in this class.  First we created content with text only and slowly progress to more advanced formats, building our knowledge from the previous week’s experiences.  Scaffolding is a very important component when teaching new tasks that have multiple steps. 

References


Clark, R. E. (1983). Reconsidering research on learning from media. Review of Educational Research, 53(4), 445-459.

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