Developing Your Lesson Prototype

Lesson Prototype: Overview

The instructional materials you develop in your prototype need to conform to the Design Guide (Links to an external site.) Links to an external site. that was prepared to assist you in creating a lesson that meets the project requirements and the instructional need. We will now review each of these section as they relate to your prototype development.

Part 1: Lesson Description

Part 1 of your prototype will be based off the Lesson Description within your Design Proposal that you completed in Module 4. There won't be many changes from your proposal, but it is likely that you will make revisions to this section as you develop and refine your prototype's lesson materials. Our advice is to continue to review the lesson description to ensure it properly summarizes the lesson you are developing.

Part 2: Lesson

Your prototype should focus on the development of instructional materials for your lesson as conceived within Part 2 of your Design Proposal. Your focus is on developing the instructional materials the instructor and learner will need during the lesson. These materials will support the instructional strategies and activities that the instructor will implement and the learners will use during the lesson delivery.

Needed Instructional Materials

When developing your lesson's instructional materials, think about the entire learning experience, including what the instructor and learners will need to see, hear, and do during the lesson. The following are some examples of the instructional materials that you may need to develop in your prototype:

Images and graphics the learners will view,
Audio the learners will hear,
Video the learners will see and hear,
Notes to guide the instructor as he or she implements your planned instructional strategies, such as presentation, demonstration, practice, and discussion,
Written text, supplementary resources, books, or other documents the learner will read, and
Assignments, quizzes, exercises, and other practice materials the learner will complete.

Remix & Adapt Existing Open Educational Resources (OER)

As we covered within Module 2, a project goal is to repurpose existing open educational resources (OER) by remixing and adapting existing openly licensed materials when and where it makes sense within your lesson. Therefore, you are strongly encouraged to incorporate available openly licensed OER within your lesson, rather than developing everything from scratch. This could be as little as using a photo from the Flickr and a video from YouTube, or as much as adapting an existing K12 lesson plan to our adult audience. As the designer and developer of this lesson, these development choices are yours to make.

Merrill's First Principles of Instruction

Drawing on material covered in Module 3, think about Merrill’s First Principles of Instruction when developing your lesson prototype. These principles will help ensure you are (a) incorporating important aspects of the learner’s experience during the lesson, (b) embedding the instruction within a relevant problem or task, and (c) contemplating important principles of instruction, such as activation, demonstration, practice, and integration. It is important the lesson materials you develop focus on what the learners will be doing during the lesson to promote their learning. Our goal should be to avoid the "shovel-ware" trap of presenting a lot of content, and then quizzing the learners for the extent of their recall of what was just presented.

Lesson Structure and Sequencing

As you are developing your lesson materials, think about how the learner will progress through the lesson with the guidance of the instructor. As introduced in Module 3, the WIPPEA framework can serve as a guide to lesson structure and sequencing, and help you to make important decisions about:

How the content and instructional activities will be sequenced?
How and when the learners will engage in active practice and reflection?
How and when learner assessment will occur?
How and when feedback and guidance will be offered?

Lesson Authoring & Development

Given this MOOC has no prerequisites, we assume many participants in this course have limited instructional development backgrounds. However, we also know that some of you are professional designers / developers. Therefore, we have chosen to use Open Author within OER Commons Links to an external site. as our required development tool. We will offer an overview of Open Author later in this module, but please consider the following regarding lesson authoring and development.

An important note about lesson authoring and development: Develop your instructional materials to the best of your abilities. If you feel most comfortable developing primarily text-based resources with other media (e.g. images, videos, etc.) linked or embedded within your lesson, that is fine. If you would like to use other authoring tools to create other types of resources, it is up to you to ensure the resulting output meets the openness requirements of this project. Using Open Author to develop the home base for your lesson should not stifle the creativity of those who feel comfortable using more sophisticated authoring and development tools. However, please note that a central project requirement is that all instructional materials you develop 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 (more on how to do this later).

Therefore, if you want to create some of your instructional materials
using any of the countless authoring tools or educational technologies,
YOU are responsible for ensuring the resource
meets the openness requirements of this project.

What does this mean? Ultimately, you can develop in any authoring tool you want, but the BIG caveat is that it is up to you as the designer / developer to figure out how to ensure that the instructors and learners can retain, reuse, revise, remix, and redistribute the resources for their needs. Open Author in OER Commons allows linking (or in some cases embedding) to Internet-based resources, but the added challenge for anyone choosing to develop resources outside of Open Author is ensuring openness of use (i.e. the ability to retain, reuse, revise, remix, and redistribute the resource).

Also, please keep in mind, the more sophisticated the development of the resource, the more challenges for the instructor to revise or remix the resource. Please consider David Wiley's perspective on how Poor Technical Choices Make Open Content Less Open Links to an external site.. Be aware that your technical choices could interfere with a user's ability to retain, reuse, revise, remix, and redistribute your resources for their needs. Wiley shares the ALMS Framework as a way of thinking about your technical choices, and the extent to which your choice of authoring technologies affect the openness of your resource.

As you are making technical choices to develop your lesson, please consider this questions as reprinted from Poor Technical Choices Make Open Content Less Open Links to an external site.:

Access to Editing Tools: Is the open content published in a format that can only be revised or remixed using tools that are extremely expensive? Is the open content published in an exotic format that can only be revised or remixed using tools that run on an obscure or discontinued platform? Is the open content published in a format that can be revised or remixed using tools that are freely available and run on all major platforms?
Level of Expertise Required: Is the open content published in a format that requires a significant amount technical expertise to revise or remix? Is the open content published in a format that requires a minimum level of technical expertise to revise or remix?
Meaningfully Editable: Is the open content published in a manner that makes its content essentially impossible to revise or remix (e.g., a scanned image of a handwritten document)? Is the open content published in a manner making its content easy to revise or remix?
Self-Sourced: It the format preferred for consuming the open content the same format preferred for revising or remixing the open content? Is the format preferred for consuming the open content different from the format preferred for revising or remixing the open content?

Here is a link to the help section in OER Commons that discusses how to upload and insert media in an OpenAuthor lesson that is created elsewhere. Supported file and media types for uploading directly to OpenAuthor are included in the limited list of file types shown below. Other file types produced as output from the development tool you chose to use need to be stored / hosted elsewhere (in a sustainable online place you find), and then linked to your OpenAccess document.

Image files (.jpg, .png, .gif)
Audio files (.mp3)
Video files (.mpg, .wmv, mp4, .flv)
Documents (.pdf, .doc, .docx, .ppt, etc)

For example, if you chose to develop a video as part of your lesson, an option would be to upload it directly to Open Author, or upload it to YouTube and link it or embed it within Open Author. However, things get more complicated for you as the designer / developer if you chose authoring tools with more complicated outputs and storage / hosting requirements (i.e. beyond videos, audio, text-based resources, etc.) Again, you can develop resources in any authoring tool you want as long as you figure out where and how to store it / host it online, and make it accessible via a link to your OpenAuthor lesson.

Bottom line, the ability of your instructors and learners to retain, reuse, revise, remix, and redistribute your resources is far more important to us than the level of development sophistication. If you develop dazzling instructional materials that your instructors and learners can't retain, reuse, revise, remix, and redistribute for their needs (hence, are not open), you haven't effectively considered the needs and constraints of this design project.

Part 3: Supplementary Resources and References

As detailed within Module 4, Part 3 of the Design Guide describes the requirements for documenting your references, attributions, and supplementary resources. These requirements apply to the development of your prototype, as well.