What is the course focus?

Course Learning Objectives

By the end of this instructional evaluation service-learning course, you should be able to:

  • Evaluate existing instructional materials to examine the extent to which they are
    effectively and efficiently designed and developed to meet the identified needs and constraints.
  • Make necessary revisions to enhance the instructional strategies and assessments, learner experience features (directions and help, aesthetics of display, lesson sequencing, and overall ease of use), affective considerations (arousing curiosity, establishing relevance, offering appropriate level of challenge, and maintaining learner’s attention), and display features (images, graphics, audio, animation, video, or print materials).

Service Learning | Gain Experience for Good

This course is a service-learning experience where you will gain experience for good. Service learning is an educational approach that incorporates academic coursework with opportunities for applied learning. Service learning is a unique form of experiential learning in that community service is a central component of the experience. A hallmark of service learning is the reciprocal benefit gained by the learner from the experience, and by the community from the service provided.

Service Learning = Academic Coursework, Community Service, and Experiential Learning

The Course Project

This is a project-based course that focuses on a real-world instructional need. As noted, the course is designed as a service-learning experience to support an important social cause. While this self-paced course is geared to individuals working alone, you have the option to work on the instructional design project with others, including as part of a class project or practicum in an instructional design program.

Building from our previous instructional design courses, this developmental evaluation course focuses on evaluation and revision/adaptation of our existing roster of open educational resources (OER) for adult basic education within the Adult Learning Zone group on OER Commons. (Links to an external site.) We are conducting this developmental evaluation as a means of refining and expanding our roster of OER.

We are taking a two-fold approach to developmental evaluation in this course:

  1. First, you will select, review, and evaluate an existing lesson designed by course participants in one of our prior Designers for Learning instructional design cohorts to examine the extent to which the instructional materials meet our evolving understanding of this instructional design project's needs, challenges, and opportunities.
  2. Second, you will redesign the lesson and develop revised instructional materials. It's your option whether to:
  • make modest adjustments to the lesson's content (e.g., different instructional activities, new assessment, sharpened objectives, etc.) to better align the lesson with the assumed needs, challenges, and opportunities, or
  • make substantial changes (e.g., redesigning the lesson for an entirely different learner, context, and/or different learning environment).

The choice of what lesson to evaluate and redesign, as well as how much and what to modify within the lesson, is yours to make based on how much time and effort you want to devote to this project. Depending on your situation, you may decide to focus on a relatively small enhancement to an existing lesson. Or, you may decide to go in an entirely new direction and use an existing lesson (or parts of several lessons) as inspiration for a completely different learner experience. Again, the choice is yours. 

You will begin the evaluation project by dissecting the adult basic education design scenario to explore key aspects of the opportunity. What are the needs, goals, and constraints? Who are the target learners? What is the instructional context? As part of the instructional evaluation, you will select an existing lesson from a roster of open educational resources that were designed and developed in a prior Designers for Learning cohort, and evaluate the extent to which the instructional materials are effectively and efficiently designed and developed to meet the needs and constraints you have identified.

Based on this evaluation, you will then adapt the materials you reviewed by revising the open educational resources to either make modest adjustments or substantial changes to the:

  • instructional strategies and assessments,
  • learner experience features, such as directions and help, aesthetics of display, lesson sequencing, and overall ease of use,
  • affective considerations, such as arousing curiosity, establishing relevance, offering appropriate level of challenge, and maintaining learner’s attention, and
  • display features, such as images, graphics, audio, animation, video, or print materials.

Project Requirements

You are asked to evaluate and 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 jobs, 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:
  • 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. 

Project Design Guide

As noted previously, a Design Guide has been created for this instructional design project. We will review the Design Guide in detail in Module 3, but feel free to skim the contents as an overview of the design project requirements.

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