Instructional Design of Educational Technology Considerations

This week, I learned from the reading materials several important design concepts that can help us examine and improve our project.

The IDT Chapter 37 talks about diversity and accessibility. Some situations mentioned open a new window for me to see instructional design in a more diverse perspective. Disability, for example, is a highly possible reason contributing to the diversity of target audience. Instead of defining people with impairment as special groups and offer separate service for them, designers are required to make incorporated scaffolds to facilitate them to use the service as anyone else. It is the example given in the book what makes me realize how important it is to avoid making someone feel outside.

But when considering the practice of such scaffolds, I started to doubt the possibility to meet everyone's needs. While it turns out that for most of the time, we just complicate such needs.  As suggested in the reading, sometimes we should make the whole text version of the instruction accessible so learners could review them later if they came across any difficulty absorbing them during the instruction. This is very easy to realize, but when learners' needs and solutions are indeed complicated, it would be our challenges to offer them the same comfort in taking instructions with various design constraints such as compatibility and cost. Thus, the book suggests doing universal design to minimize the barriers for any group to use. Previously we mainly talked about making our design specifically tailored to local needs and target audience’s necessities, which sounds contradictory with the idea of universal design. While now I think the universal design is mainly about accessibility and needs analyses is mainly about content, so both processes should be carefully done in design.

 Belland and Drake (2013) argue that affordances and motives drive how and why K-12 students use computer-based scaffolds. As important in facilitating diversity and accessibility, scaffolding is also important in supporting higher-order thinking. Therefore, the authors call upon designers to assess target audience's motives to make affordance align with them. And in building such scaffolds, process, situation and affordance models are supposed to be done.

Mayer (2003) discusses the promise of multimedia learning and concludes several instructional methods that would be useful across different media. The findings are that students learn more deeply when words and pictures are combined; when extraneous materials are excluded; when words are represented near corresponding pictures and when words are expressed in the conversational style. 

References:

Mayer 2003

Belland and Drake 2013

[IDT] Chapter 37