Three Online Classes

Case Studies in Instructional Design was a blended course which met face-to-face at Purdue, but also had an on-line component with a sister class at NEIU. My classmate Chao-yan and I developed an instructional videotape and accompanying materials on the case study Mary Robbins from our textbook The ID CaseBook: Case Studies in Instructional Design by Peggy A. Ertmer and James Quinn published by Prentice-Hall, 1999. The case involved 4 young students who were training at an elite beauty academy in LA. Both cast and crew had a lot of fun with the concept. I combed the shelves at a local drug store and beautician supply store for wild (but affordable) beauty products - such as spray-on or comb-in hair coloring, hair spiking gel, false fingernails, blue lipstick, and lots of face glitter. For the credits we filmed our fellow graduate-student actors doing one another's hair and otherwise 'getting into character' to the back drop of Iggy Pop's Real Wild Child. We used the third floor lounge in Purdue's Stewart Center for the salon interior because it had mirrors all the way around, and we found a simple jpg image (with palm trees) for the shop's exterior. The beauty magazines and stylist instructions served as cheat sheets for the scripts. We had two cameras rolling and afterwards Chao-yan and I plunged into a self-taught crash course in digital video-editing over the course of one weekend in the department's computer lab. The props also came in handy for some role playing when we actually presented the case to our classmates - as the department's computer kept crashing when we tried to move the final version onto tape - or even onto cd in a shareable format. We may have overwhelmed its little memory. =:o Since the computer version was so tiny, we decided to have the class role play part of the case before we showed them the entire video. Afterwards we split the class up in small groups to discuss instructional design issues presented in the case. Here in Real Media format, here is a very brief excerpt of the video in which I get to have green hair.

In the on-line Ed Tech Seminar course my classmate Jill from the Calumet campus and I developed instruction for and moderated an on-line discussion on Copyright and Fair Use on WebCT. I also wrote a paper on current issues and my definition of Educational Technology But How Do You Plow with a Mouse? We did meet face to face twice - at the beginning and end of the semester, with out-of-town classmates traveling the distance to get there.

In the strictly on-line Instructional Strategies course, due to scheduling difficulties, I never met with my classmates or instructor face to face although the class did physically meet once at the beginning of the semester. In this class we studied metacognitive learning strategies such as chunking, motivational strategies such as relevance, and instructional methods such as simulation based on personal experience, our textbooks, and the most recent literature available. For the final assignment I developed an instructional blueprint on Maximizing Relevance in Computer-Mediated-Communication utilizing the various strategies.