Design Guide: Project Requirements Overview
Overview
As mentioned, the instructional materials you are evaluating and redesigning were originally created by participants in prior Designers for Learning service-learning cohorts. You are asked to evaluate, revise, and the develop open educational resources (OER) for adult basic education based on the following project requirements:
- The instructional materials you evaluate and revise will support adult learners with low math and literacy skills seeking to acquire new knowledge and skills to pursue their life goals and career aspirations. Most of these adult learners have not completed high school, and are taking adult basic education courses as they prepare for careers, high school equivalency exams (e.g., the GED, HiSET, or TASC tests), or other adult basic education certifications.
- Instructional materials you evaluate and revise will be selected from the roster of existing resources within the Adult Learning Zone group on OER Commons Links to an external site. and licensed under a Creative Commons copyright license Links to an external site. as free open educational resources (OER). To ensure the broadest use of your work, we request that you select a Creative Commons CC BY 4.0 license Links to an external site. for your work.
- The contextualized instruction you evaluate and revise will target the knowledge and skills needed to be life, career, or college ready, and will focus on authentic contexts, problems, and tasks the learners will encounter in real life.
- If you would like to make more than modest adjustments to the resource(s) you evaluate, you are also able to design and develop more substantial changes that adapt the materials to a different: (a) real-world problem or task, (b) targeted knowledge and skills, (c) intended learner audience, and/or (d) grade level. The choice regarding the scope of modifications to make is yours based on how much time and effort you want to devote to this project.
- The instructional materials you evaluate and revise will:
- conform to the project's Design Guide,
- be developed within Open Author on OER Commons Links to an external site.,
- align with the College and Career Readiness Standards Links to an external site. (CCRS) that underlie high school equivalency exams and other adult basic education programs,
- incorporate guidance for the instructor implementing the lesson,
- include all necessary content presentation, learner practice, and assessment materials for instruction on the topic and standard you have chosen.
- All instructional materials you evaluate and revise must be open educational resources that (a) our instructors and learners can retain, reuse, revise, remix, and redistribute Links to an external site. without additional login or paywall, and (b) can be linked or embedded within Open Author.
The Project Design Guide
The instructional materials are designed and developed to conform to the Design Guide created to assist designers in creating a lesson that meets the project requirements and the instructional need. Much like an architect’s blueprint, the project requirements and the Design Guide for this project describe the who, what, where, when, why, and how of the lesson.
For your reference, a link to the Design Guide document appears in the left navigation menu on each page of this course, as shown in the figure below:
Before we move on ...
Please take a few minutes to open and skim through the Design Guide. As shown in the figure below, there are three parts to the Design Guide, including (1) Lesson Description, (2) Lesson, and (3) Supplementary Resources and References.
As you review the contents of the Design Guide (see screenshot below), note how it addresses the focus and scope of the lesson, and guides instructional designers to ensure the lessons they design and develop address important questions. For example:
- Who is the audience for this lesson?
- What skills and knowledge are targeting within the learning experience?
- What is the intended grade level of the lesson?
- What materials will be required?