Guided Design

Reflection on Guided Design

After reading what I have about Guided Design, I would have to say that I’m an avid enthusiast of this approach to E-learning for three reasons:  it’s relevant to the real world, it’s incredibly well-thought out, and the problem-solving skills fostered in this approach transfer so well to real-life applications.  It does share the same emphasis on small groups as the A-T approach, but this does not make it dysfunctional:  decisions are generally made in concert with peers in the real world, after all.

As stated by White and Coscarelli (1986), the Guided Design approach was developed “with the objective of helping students to become ‘adaptive, creative, independent people.’  He reasoned that before students could reach that goal, they would have to obtain three different types of skills:  knowledge, decision-making, and values.  Traditional teaching…typically concentrate(s) on only the first, knowledge.  In order for students to learn decision-making skills and value skills a completely new educational system must be designed.”  They state that a mentor is necessary to guide others stepwise in acquiring decision-making skills, that students must practice “applying these decision-making steps to progressively more difficult problems, and that the mentor “must be available at each step of the process to point out errors or answer questions.”  That, in my opinion, creates a formidable task for the online teacher.  I think that if the mentor is divorced from the milieu in which the problem-solving strategies are required, there may not be sufficient understanding on the part of the mentor to adequately supply the steps needed to solve a particular problem.

The Guided Design approach prescribes the following activities:

• Independent Study

Students are to learn the class material outside of class from “programmed instruction materials, audio-tutorial lectures, or a textbook supplemented by teaching notes.”

• Small Groups

“Students are organized into groups of 4-6 to apply their knowledge skills in solving unstructured, open-ended problems.”

• Guided Design Projects

“Each project is designed so that students must apply the course content material that they have just learned, thus creating a need for their knowledge skills.”

• Instructor as Model and Mentor

The instructor “must help to guide students through the decision-making process and show them how a professional applies both knowledge and values in solving real problems”, rather than simply being a “transmitter of knowledge.”

• Competency-Based Testing

“Tests are…developed from the performance objectives established for the independent study material.”

• Grading

“Grades are usually based on both test scores and grades assigned to project reports.”

Altogether, this is the most effective approach to preparing young people for the real world that I have seen to date:  We have progressed from lecture format to mentorship and have begun to employ real-life situations requiring real-life problem solving techniques in a real-life manner.  The only difference is, in the real world, you don’t get a grade:  you eat or get eaten!

In addition, I am particularly enamored with White and Coscarelli’s attention to hierarchical analysis.  They advise that the creation of a hierarchical analysis will force the instructor to “look at what (he/she) want(s) the students to learn and how all of the parts of the course fit together.”  Hierarchical analysis implies that there are a number of skills to be learned in a Guided Design course, and that the mastery of some skills is required before progressing to other skills.  Hierarchical analysis enables the instructor to organize skills from easiest to hardest, thus more efficiently organizing the course content.

As stated earlier, the instructor (or mentor) has the formidable task of guiding his various groups of students through the decision-making process.  This can be particularly daunting, as no one person has faced all the problems which are to be solved, especially considering the quantity of problems the mentor must examine in order to help his students find solutions to those problems.  For this reason I would be hesitant to use this approach, unless I only had a couple dozen students.  I would imagine that the person who is able to overcome this disadvantage will have the satisfaction of knowing that his students are going out into the world armed with general problem-solving strategies which, with higher-order thinking skills such as synthesis, will enable them to tackle problems not covered in class.

I see online collaborative resources such as Elluminate as being instrumental to small groups with this approach.  Elluminate and similar packages will allow students to get together to strategize and to work on group projects.  They may have to be patient with their instructor, however, as he/she may struggle to provide the step-by-step guidance they need in solving problems.  Synchronous instruction may be impossible in the case of large classes.  The instructor may need to rely upon tutors, or point his/her students in the direction of online and other resources to help them learn problem-solving strategies.

A Guided Design-based course probably wouldn’t need an LMS such as Moodle in order to operate.  This kind of course relies on communication between instructor and students, hence any e-mail supplemented by Messenger or Elluminate for instant communication would probably be adequate.  Of course, one would also need an online evaluation tool, such as test.com.

References

Coscarelly, W.C., and White, G.P.; The Guided Design Handbook:  Patterns in Implementation. (1986) Morgantown, WV: National Center for Guided Design.

Reflection: The A-T Approach

Postlethwait’s Audio-Tutorial method impresses me as an extravagantly complicated method for delivering instruction.  The three phases: General Assembly Session (GAS), Independent Study Session (ISS), and Integrated Quiz Session (IQS) left me asking myself if this method isn’t virtually what I did in my old foreign language classes.

Kulik, Kulik, and Cohen (1979) state that “(m)any researchers who compared A-T and conventional teaching concluded that this approach was at least as effective as conventional training.”  However, they indicate that “Keller’s Personalized System of Instruction or PSI…has produced much more dramatic results.”  PSI “made a substantial contribution to examination performance and also contributed significantly to student ratings of course quality.”  They clearly were not as impressed with the A-T approach.  They conclude that “A-T does not lead to higher or lower course ratings than conventional teaching methods.

One of the advantages of this system is allegedly to progress through the material at their own pace.  This may appear to be an attractive feature, but Kulik, Kulik, and Cohen point out in their monograph that pacing does not appear to ameliorate the differences between the slower and the more efficient learners

This method appears to be what a financially well-endowed school might want to use if it wanted to appear “trendy.”  Certainly, under this method, students are no longer sequestered by long-winded, mind-numbingly boring instructors who seem to ramble on and on long after the most astute class member has lost his/her attention span.

As mentioned in the lecture, several barriers appear:  students need to be self-directed and must take the responsibility for their own learning, the creation of tapes and other media is time-consuming, and, in the physical “learning lab”, materials had to be organized for student use.  Many students, however, adapt well to being self-directed (although not all are) and the internet allows us greater efficiency in organizing, creating, and distributing the learning materials.

Still, it is unlikely that I will use the A-T approach, as the Keller Plan, and especially the Guided Learning method appear to be superior methods of delivery of instruction via internet.  I feel that the three phases of the A-T approach make the delivery of online instruction unnecessarily difficult, especially when coordinating small assembly sessions and peer support sessions.  Perhaps modifications could be made, but once they were, A-T would closely resemble other more efficient methodologies.

Were this model to be used, audio-visual materials could easily be delivered by YouTube, Ustreem, and  mp3 files.  Websites such as Dimdim, Elluminate and Come To Meeting could be used for peer tutoring sessions.  Quiz sites such as Quia could be used.  Certainly Moodle could be used to deliver most if not all of the class materials.

References:

Kulik, J. A., Kulik, C. C., and Cohen, P.A.; Research on Audio-Tutorial Instruction: A Meta-Analysis of Comparative Studies. (1979)

Reflection on Davis

Reflection on Davis

“…learning is a very creative activity that can seldom be scheduled. That is, no teacher, no matter how good, can say “You will learn this, now!” Learning is basically an asynchronous, creative adventure. Accordingly, we should attempt to design learning environments that facilitate asynchronous learning experiences for all students. Synchronicity should be a choice not a demand.”

What a profound statement this is, and it is, in my opinion, the most important statement made in this monograph.  Since the beginning of recorded history, instruction has relied on synchronicity, viz., all students are to assemble at the instructor’s feet, as it were, to receive an education.  The instructor communicated the perceived necessary information and may well have used the Socratic method to encourage the use of critical thinking among his students, gauging his disciples’ reactions for evidence of having achieved comprehension.  Such educational activities could hardly be done if the students were scattered in time and in place.

With the advent of modern technologies, it is no longer necessary to require the students to be in the same place at the same time, and, especially with the development of the internet, it is remarkable that some institutions continue to require students to convene in one geographical location at a particular time in order to be taught.  True, there are academic subjects which, by their nature, require a laboratory which is extremely difficult if not impossible to accomplish by means of an internet connection, but generally, we have come to a time in our history when we realize that we need no longer be bound to traditional methods for learning.

That there are efficient learners and inefficient learners is hardly a new discovery.  With modern technologies it is possible to accommodate learners, however fast or slow, however good or poor.

I have long been critical of the “cookie cutter” concept in education that assumes that all students will learn the same material at the same time and at the same pace.  Every student brings his/her own learning ability into the classroom, and it is immensely unfair to expect the slower learners to somehow speed up their cognitive capabilities or for the faster learners to force themselves into a cognitive suspended animation while waiting for the rest of the class to catch up with them.  “Accommodation” is the magic word here:  modern technologies accommodate students with differing learning capabilities, and we do our students a tremendous disservice by expecting them all to learn at the same rate.

The Keller Plan

The Keller plan offers a very simple, commonsense approach to education which is just as applicable in the classroom as it is online or aided by other media such as CDs and other media.

1.                  Clear educational objectives

Morrison, Ross, and Kemp (2007) describe three important functions of educational objectives:  to “select and organize instructional activities and resources that facilitate effective learning”, to “provide a framework for devising ways to evaluate student learning” and to “guide the learner.  The rationale is that students will use the objectives to identify the skills and knowledge they must master.”

We have probably all taken courses in which there did not seem to be any particular set of objectives:  the instructor rambled seemingly incoherently as well as indefinitely, taxing the attention levels of the students.  With the Keller plan, students know in advance what cognitive and behavioral objectives will be satisfied.

           

2.                  Small learning modules with associated achievement tests and immediate feedback.

This, I believe, is a common sense approach to education.  The learner is not overwhelmed with a vast amount of information upon which he/she will be tested.  Rather, the lesson is broken up into “bite-sized” morsels which are more easily digested, after which the learner receives input as to how successfully his/her learning experience has transpired.

Learning, I believe, is like painting a portrait:  we do not paint the whole picture and then ask ourselves if it looks like the person we have in mind.  We paint the background and evaluate whether it is to our satisfaction.  Then we do the same with the face, the eyes, the hair, so on and so forth, one object at a time.  Finally, we can look at the overall picture and evaluate ourselves on the whole piece of artwork.

3.                  Student self-pacing

Morrison, Ross, and Kemp (2007) indicate that “much evidence supports the belief that optimum learning takes place when a student works at his or her own pace, is actively involved in performing specific learning tasks, and experiences success in learning.”  They add that “the important features for the learner are responsibility, pacing, and successful learning based on specific learning objectives and a variety of activities with accompanying resources.” (pp. 219-220).

4.                  Positive reinforcement

According to Davidson-Shivers and Rasmussen (2006), “(p)ositive reinforcers are used to maintain and strengthen desirable behaviors and are those things considered to be pleasant that are presented after the desired behavior has occurred.” (p.41).  Although positive reinforcers are effective when used appropriately in the educational process, Davidson-Shivers and Rasmussen include that “(b)ecause it is doubtful that any form of punishment would be very successful within a WBI situation, it is best to apply positive reinforcers and avoid negative consequences.”(p. 43).

5.                  Student emphasis on doing rather than listening

Coscarelli & White (1986) state that “(e)ffective instructional systems emphasize active rather than passive involvement in learning.  “As contrasted with the stereotypical lecture session, individualized mastery approaches will expect the learner to assume active involvement in the class. The teacher is no longer responsible for pouring knowledge into waiting vessels.” (p.6).  There is, instead, an emphasis on learning rather than on teaching.  The teacher, then, becomes  more of a manager of the students’ learning experience.

A few years ago, I earned an Associate of Applied Science degree in Drafting Design Technology.  Lectures were brief, but were given only as necessary.  The greater emphasis was on labs, as the class needed to engage in activities which would result in the successful acquisition of a new marketable skill.  Having been in such an ambience, I can testify to how much better one learns with educational activities rather than by passively listening to lecture.

My initial reaction to this model is that it makes all the sense in the world.  It recognizes that distance education is growing at an astonishing rate and that today’s technology is makes the academic establishment well able to reach those who, for any reason, cannot receive their education within the walls of a brick-and-mortar college.

The key elements of the Keller plan:  clear educational objectives, small learning modules with associated achievement tests and immediate feedback, student self-pacing, positive reinforcement, and student emphasis on doing rather than listening, are principles that work marvelously in the classroom.  It is all too obvious that these elements would greatly benefit distance education.

Arranging for qualified student assistants to be present during class times can present a problem.  The financial aspect of this may be prohibitive.  Test preparation on the part of the instructor might also prevent time constraints.

I would absolutely use this model when teaching via internet or other media.  It is extremely well-thought out, is based on much research, has been developed successfully at many educational establishments, and has proven to be of great value in distance education.  Perhaps a staff of instructors working in concert could alleviate the problem of recruiting others to monitor student behavior.

There are learning management systems such as WebCT which could be used to leveraged to employ the Keller plan in an online learning environment.  I have used sites such as MyICourse.com to deliver instruction, and it can easily be seen how the Keller plan could operate in concert with that site.  Microsoft’s Learning Content Development System could also easily be employed with the Keller plan.

References:

Coscarelli, W., and White, G. (1986).  The Guided Design Guidebook:  Patterns in Implementation.  Morgantown, WV:  The National Center for Guided Design, West Virginia University.

Davidson-Shivers, G., and Rasmussen, K.  (2006).  Web-Based Learning:  Design, Implementation, and Evaluation.  Upper Saddle River, NJ:  Pearson Education, Inc.

Morrison, G., Ross, S., and Kemp, J.  (2007).  Designing Effective Instruction. John Wiley & Sons, Inc.