Job aids potential topics

Topic 1: how to brew an espresso with "De'Longhi EC155 15 BAR Pump Espresso and Cappuccino Maker". 

We currently bought this espresso machine to brew coffee at home and found out the manual is extremely abstract and hard to understand, especially for English non-native speakers. Therefore, I would like to create a job aid for making a nice cup of espresso with this espresso machine to help people who are as confused as I am. I might also include information on bean choosing and grinding selection. 

Topic 2: Tax return preparation for foreigners. 

Tax return is also an extremely confusing process which I have not yet figured out. One of the greatest problem is its term usage in the instruction, which many of my friends have been complaining about. It would be great if I can ever get familiar with the whole process and design a job aid to make the process easier and understandable for people, but I am not confident of me ever understand the whole complicated procedure... 

Week 8- Scaffolding

Summary:

• Tom Bruch, John Saye
• Soft scaffolds, the dynamic actions of a teacher or peer in support of an activity
• Hard scaffolds: the static supports that can be planned in advance.

• Four types of scaffolding (Hannafin, Land, Oliver, 1999)
• Conceptual: 
• "here's the help you'll need for understanding this concept
•  --> highlight important concepts, provide questions or definition
• Strategic: 
• --> bullet points/ listing / diagrams
• Metacognitive
• --> reflection
• Procedural
• --> clip guy-information on procedure

• Things to think about:
• Complexity: ease vs challenge
• Structure: contrived vs realistic/ authentic
• Depth: basic vs deep understanding

• Decision points
• Presentation of content
• Practice
• Feedback
• Assessment
• Feedback
• Conclusion(reflection)

• A word about fading
• The goal: fade the support; achieve learner independence
• We don't always get this right

• How do we consider scaffolding in our design?
• Intentional design decisions
• Hard scaffolding
• Soft scaffolding
• With consideration for
• Complexity
• Structure
•  depth
• At various decision points
• Presentation
• Practice/feedback
• Assessment/feedback

• What's the difference between a job aid and a scaffold?
• Technology tools for job aids/ scaffolding
• Adobe captivate
• Groups diigo  

Reflection:

                                                  "What's the difference between a job aid and a scaffold? "

      To answer this question, I searched for more information on job aids and I found these two links to be extremely helpful: Designing a job aid, Dave's Ensampler. Based on my understanding, they are different in the following aspects:

	Job Aids	Scaffold
Purpose	To quickly access information to perform a task	To effectively acquire knowledge during task execution
Design	Gear towards one specific task	Gear towards specific learning goals
Element	Only involves presentation	Involves presentation, practice, feedback and assessment
Type	Tend to be procedural	Can be conceptual, strategic, metacognitive or procedural.

Basically, I feel that job aid is a part of scaffolding process while scaffolding involves a broader scope of learner's learning. I don't know if I understand correctly though... 

Week 7: Storytelling/ humor/ cases

Summary:

What is the role of humor?

• To create a memorable moment
• To foster a creative collaborative environment
• "contextually rich learning"
• Attention
• Encoding
• Emotion: emotion drives attention and attention drives  learning-Robert sylwester.

Why do we use stories? (Jonassen & Hernandez-Serrano, 2002)

• To convey or make meaning

• As a cultural communication tool

• To affirm commonalities or make distinctions

• To create memories

• To frame interpretations

• To understand

• To support arguments
• To facilitate vicarious interactions
• To facilitate authentic exploration

What is a story? (common elements)

• Context and characters
• Beginning, middle, end
• Conflict, climax, resolution
• Types:
• The springboard: what you can get learners from here to there; "I did this and you can, too" story.
• The exemplary situation: "the best way to do it" story
• The cautionary tale: don't do this, or something terrible will happen
• The turning point: we were doing this and we change our direction, and this happened as result.
• The historical account: part of what happened in the history
• The news item
• The allegory/ parable/ fable/ myth

What is a case?

• A story with a targeted learning or assessment purpose
• Sometimes called a scenario or a case-scenario

When do we use a case?

• To illustrate a pathway or best practice: learner reflects, discusses meaning
• As source for learner response, application of knowledge (formative assessment)
• To reveal gaps in learner knowledge: learner provides response, reflects, experiences, collaborative interactions, discusses meaning
• As summative assessment tool: learner provides response, is scored according to established criteria

Developing the Case

• Context and characters
• Challenge
• Timeline
• [the response]
• [results]

Decision points

• Introduction

• Presentation of content

• Practice
• Feedback
• Assessment
• Feedback
• Conclusion

A word of caution

• It is important to understand the range of cultural considerations
• Humor rarely translates between cultures and languages
• Don’t' essentialize: don't use characters or storylines that will deepen the negative impression/ perception on a certain group of people. Ex, use a Hispanic person as a criminal character.

Reflection: 

        Storytelling is an important element in teaching. Dr. G and Dr. L's screenshots together provides a comprehensive introduction to the theoretical principles and practical application of this element. On top of Dr. G's elaboration on case development, I think if we would like to use case analysis as a summative assessment, we should plan out the evaluation criteria first, and then develop the case based on the evaluation criteria. This shall ensure the case story includes all that should be evaluated. 

        The RSS story video in Dr. L's screenshot not only is interesting but also happens to be our project content. We might include this video in our project. "The open textbooks explained example" is an awesome idea for developing storytelling video when we lack the skills of using computer software to design graphics or animations. 

        Finally, in terms of humor and essentializing, it is true that humor doesn't translate between languages and cultures. For example, Americans like to show humor through sarcasm, which is something doesn't exist in Asian cultures. Using sarcasm as a way of humor may only make students of other cultures feel bad about themselves because they do not feel engaged in the situation and sometimes they even need someone else to explain to them why it is funny. It is also true that we should not use characters or story lines that will deepen the negative impression/ perception on a certain group of people. What is ironic is, I did not learn any of the negative perceptions until I started my studies in the US and people kept "EMPHASIZING" that we should NOT EMPHASIZING these negative perceptions and then explain what negative perceptions exists currently. If they did not tell me those existing ideologies, I may not even develop those perceptions. What makes the situation even more complicated is that, obviously, if you don't know these ideologies and act upon them, people recognize you as a foreigner, an outsider of this society. So what now? 

Week 6: Evaluation and assessment of learners

Summary: 
Why do we assess learners?

• To make decisions
• About students
• Learning
• Placement
• Degree
• Recognition
• Remediation
• About instruction
• Effectiveness
• Pace
• Material
• Coverage

Start with

• Learning/ performance objectives
• Objectives should be clear, measurable, represent knowledge/ skill gains, not activties

Important consideration: reliability

• Assessment reliability
• How consistently does this measure the thing?
• Examples:
• Bathroom scale: if you gain 20 pounds within one day, then you will question the reliability of the scale
• Driver's test
• Assumption: assessments should be reliable and not subject to the following:
• Error
• Wide range of interpretations regarding what is being asked
• Limitations of observation

Important consideration: validity

• Assessment validity
• How do the procedures and interpretations support our purpose?
• Content: alignment between test and course content
• Dose the bathroom scale measure weight in pounds?
• Criterion: real-world correlation
• Does the number on the bathroom scale provide us with an accurate measure of weight loss?
• Does the number on the bathroom scale provide us with an accurate measure of fat loss?
• Construct: meaning
• What does the weight mean or signify?

Essay:

• Long or short repsonses to a prompt
• Instructions should be detailed
• Question should specify all expectations
• Criteria for scoring should be cleraly established in form of chekclist  or rubric
• Easy to writing, time-consuming to score

Performance

• Demonstration of skill
• Can be speech, project, or other format
• Instructions should be detailed and specify all expectations
• Scored according to detailed criteria in the form of checklist or rubric
• Reliable assessments are difficult to write and time-consuming to score

Personal interview: (eg qualifying exam, conference presentation)

Decision points:

• Why do we need to know this and what do we need to know?
• During instruction (formative)
• Following instruction (summative)
• Remediation opportunities?
• High stakes? SAT--> the purpose is not valid, but the test itself is valid and reliable. Using SAT as an indicator of school performance is a wrongful claim.

Reflection: 
           One of the things I have been missing out is the connection between learning objectives and learning content. There is always a weak link between these two nodes in my lesson plan. In fact, I believe many teachers, especially novice ones like me, oversee this link. Well, instead of saying "oversee this link", maybe I should say that I always determine my teaching content first and then write down my teaching objectives based on that. It is easier for me to design my teaching without setting up the objectives first. 
          I understand that my design order is wrong. I should determine teaching objectives first and then design my teaching content according to that; otherwise, it would be meaningless to set up objectives. Yet, it is really difficult for me to think and design in this order. What should I do? 
         In addition to the instructional design perspective, Dr. L introduced several handy technologies for evaluation and feedback. iRubric is the most useful one among all. I definitely will use it for my future teaching and our final project. StudyBlue seems pretty cool, too. I might try to use it for self-study purpose. Polleverywhere is fun and eye-catching, but it is only useful in large-scale classes. If it is a small class, I can just ask students to respond by raising hands or answer my questions. Another drawback of using Polleverywhere is that it gives students a legitimate reason to take out their smartphones or laptops, which may become a serious distraction in class. 

Week 5: Motivation-Reflection on our major project

Our major project for R541 is to create a webquest for preservice teacher in W200 to learn how to incorporate Personal Learning Networks (PLN) into their teaching as well as for their professional growth.
During the class discussion, Dr. G tossed out a question regarding our major project: "how are you going to motivate a bunch of 19-year-old college students to learn something they do not care about at this point of time?" Great question. We didn't really think about that.

I guess, in order for students to be engaged in this topic, we will need to take the following steps:

1. In the introduction section, we can provide some fun videos to demonstrate why learning about PLN is important  in terms of building up individual's professional image and benign professional connections.
2. We can also provide interview recordings of the Jacob teachers (the outstanding educators in Indiana) speaking about incorporating PLN as examples to demonstrate how PLN has been successfully used to increase students' learning effectiveness and motivation. 
3. One of the tasks in the process will require students to create a PLN community (e.g. a facebook group) for learning PLN. In this way, students will gain a sense of ownership and a sense of achievement during the process. Through the collaborating learning and social interaction in the group, students will also understand the value of PLN in terms of learning as well as professional growth. 

 Those are the ideas we have so far for motivating our students. Let us know if you have some other ideas!!