 Hi, my name is Tracy Tejohame Spinoza and this is a video on instructional design. Today we're going to begin by defining the term, we're going to look at multiple standards that exist but use one framework to talk about 10 steps in creating instructional design and then we're going to look at a worked model so that you have an example of the kinds of things we're looking for in great instructional design. So this is all going to be done within the framework of teachers' new pedagogical knowledge. Back in the 80s it was okay just to know your stuff, right? If you're good at math, let's be a math teacher. But then we realized that you had to really add on to this pedagogical knowledge. How do you teach that? And even more so, how do you teach pedagogical content knowledge? How do you know how to teach math by understanding and anticipating kids' errors and knowing what kinds of activities can attend to that? And then in the 90s we added on this piece of technology. We started to look at the ways that we could leverage technology to sort of offload some of those tedious tasks, those self-correcting tests, for example, so that we didn't have to do those things one by one. So we could have much more time to spend with our students explaining, motivating, helping them see how they could grow within our subject matters. Then starting around 2007 or so we began to incorporate much more of the learning sciences. There's a lot more information out there about the brain and how it actually learns that should be a part of teachers' new knowledge. So if we put all of those things within our own context and our cultural structures, then we can become learning scientists. And that's kind of the ultimate goal these days. So if we adapt that framework, one of the things that we also have to do is think about what do we know about human learning in general? And that means that as we create these new classes, we have to make sure we stay away from the neuromiths, things that tell us that boys and girls' brains do things differently, or people use 10% of their brain, or that children have the attention span of a fish or something like that. We have to get rid of some of that junky information and then use some of the good information and then bake in some of that really great information, the things that we know are true about human learning and incorporate that within our instructional design as well. This will basically influence a lot of the choices we make about the types of evaluation, the types of activities we incorporate, and help us justify better choices within those tools. So there's a ton of different standards that are out there. A lot of people reviewing this information, looking at how we should have standards for new online learning, especially within the kindergarten and lower levels, kindergarten through 12th grade. We have a lot of information about university level, but K-12 has received less attention, less publications, but there are standards. And so one set of standards comes from ACT, which we're going to be using because it has a nice 10-step structure that we can use to sort of frame this reflection about how to design our own courses. So as we go through each of these 10 steps, I'd like you to think about your own classes and maybe jot down some notes about the things that you want to talk about when we're together so that we can now have the building blocks for creating that wonderful course that you want to do within your subject matter, within your grade level, and tending to the special needs of the kids that are in your class, okay? So standard number one, basic educational practice is pretty much understanding by design, backward design. What is my objective? How will I measure it? Then what activities do I do? Just sort of keep that framework, but you have to have a very clear purpose. It's obvious and articulated to the students. Now sometimes these things are imposed and they come down institutionally. Other times there's things that the instructor develops with the students, but independent of where it comes from, it has to be obvious and it has to be clear to the learners themselves. And this basically means having really well set out goals and objectives and that everybody's on the same page about where we're going. The second step has to do with assumptions. This really havers around prerequisite knowledge, things that we think people know before they get to us. And so have we laid out the bookends? What do we think happens before our class? And what do we presume we can offer to the next class or the next level of education? So basically are those assumptions clear? Is the shape and development of the purpose of the course very clear to all of the participants? As we said, most of these assumptions are based on what a student should know before they get to you. But there's also some presumptions we make about technology and what people are able to do. A lot of talk about, yeah kids, digital natives, they'll just pick it up. Truth of the matter is there's a lot of guidance that needs to take place in order for these tools to be really well incorporated into our classroom settings. And more than ever, these days we can't make a presumptions about what technology is available to students in their homes or what kind of support they have. Do their parents or grandparents who are taking care of them actually know how to help guide those students? So we sort of have to create a foolproof instructional design that gets around all of those questions or at least creates sub-tutorials that would allow for students to find that information, fill in those gaps if they didn't have it before. So sort of dovetailing on the second point of assumptions, we have sequence and this means it's logical order. In terms of learning sciences, this is considered a trajectory of learning or a neuro-constructivist hierarchical design. Have we put in places with the basic information first so the kids can easily scaffold their learning to the next level? So again, this means identifying what their prior knowledge is and identifying those gaps and being able to fill it in within the instructional design of our classroom structure. This means sort of like one stop shopping. No matter what the entry point of the student, if they're coming in you know way above expectations or if they're coming right about you know what we'd expect for the student or if they've got a lot of deficits, have we created spaces where there's enough material and support information so that that kid can fill in those gaps and everybody can end up reaching those same objectives at the end of the day? There's multiple models that do this when we talk about the right kind of sequence. Some of them do these spiral learning in which you do a lot of repetition of certain concepts so that's reinforced over time. Other types of designs that are laid out in your online classroom have to do with just sort of module sequence so that's clear to the student. Other ways of doing this are you have step, step one, two, three, four and so that they build off of each other. Whatever your choice of design, circular, linear by stages, make sure that that's something that's very obvious to the students and that when we do the design of our course that those steps are very clear. The fourth step is what teachers usually just jump to. They want to know what kind of activities they can incorporate or what kinds of technologies are the most appropriate. One thing to remember is that traditional activities you know like reading or doing these fun experiments at home you know creating a battery out of lemons and things like that can be complemented now by this high tech that we have here. Many of you have huge exchanges with your classes through what's up or you've been using Zoom already. Well part of the idea is to create this balance between synchronous and asynchronous activities to create this new blended experience in which there's a lot of self-selected and self-developed learning activities so there's autonomy on the part of the student but you've given that framework. It's kind of like as parents what we do with eating you know I get to decide what we're going to eat and you get to decide you know how much so you get to sort of pick and choose from different spaces here but the teacher still remains the designer of that learning experience. What are the parameters within which you can choose? The fifth point has to do with the types of resources that exist and obviously there's traditional resources. A lot of you have subscribed to things like texts online and things like that. What we'd like to motivate you to think about is this multimodal angle now. Being online provides a huge new open access smorgasbord of offers that we didn't necessarily have within classroom structures and this may very well be the end of the textbook as we know it because there's so many other options available. So in a bundle or mini library which we like to motivate teachers to curate based on every one of their subjects instead of just having you know the traditional readings that you might have before or these you know worksheets that you might send home so that they have these activities that they do we also want to motivate you to think about doing things like incorporating more videos not only of yourself but also of other models of that type of learning experience or those competencies. What kind of skill sets that you want them to have and that you can model them through the videos. Other things like podcasts which they can listen to as they're doing their chores around the house these days and in addition to those things which might seem kind of obvious we want to add on things like platforms hyper links to specific platforms for example like conacademy where students can do those students who need extra repetition can be guided to a specific page that would actually meet their needs as far as filling in certain gaps of information or knowledge. Additionally there's things like apps that can be put into these bundles hyperlinks to apps for example the free app Duolingo. If you are teaching a foreign language and you want your students to get practice and rehearsal in pronunciation or in spelling or in a foreign language you can use this app it could tell them please spend 20 minutes on Duolingo or please spend enough time to get to the next level in Duolingo for example. And finally another element to bundles that we'd like to motivate you to consider has to do with gaming. Now educational gaming has taken off like crazy mainly because we've sort of figured out this algorithm of how to keep students motivated and hooked into the information. So if any of you have ever played Mario you know that there's these different levels that you have to get to and there's different tasks to get to the levels. Well we know that learning takes a certain level of repetition for things to be recalled really quickly. So one of the things that gaming does educational gaming is it leverages those algorithms so that kids get enough rehearsal at different levels and it keeps them motivated because it doesn't let them fail too much and it doesn't let them succeed too much. So the algorithm adjusts the difficulty so that they are able to get enough practice and be able to dominate the skill set that's part of that. So there's things like the number raise or fast forward there's a lot of games out there now that help hook kids and keep them motivated to do enough repetitions so that the skill set becomes second nature. The sixth standard or the sixth step that we'd like to look at is how do you actually do application of learning with an instructional design and this basically means this balance between independent activities and collaborative activities. So how do we design the learning experiences where we have enough balance between things that are active and these opportunities for free choice and that they have enough rehearsal and practice as we mentioned before by leveraging things that are already out there like social media or offline groups where they're working together. So we have to have a balance between the things that are independently driven and the things that are collaborative in order to keep that balance of interest on the part of the students where they have enough independence but that we've baked into this group work because learning is social one plus one is three you know that kid knows something that kid knows something but the minute you get them together they know something more than either of them could have done by themselves. So we have to find ways to create those types of learning structures within our instructional design. The seventh point is huge and it has to do with assessment and this is going to be one of the biggest changes in education that will stay with us long beyond any pandemic or any shift that we're now currently making and that's because online instruction has now opened our eyes to a huge variety of ways to assess and to evaluate and so not only these traditional things of you know using tests but now using tests in a different way instead of using them as a summit of assessment for our students we can have a mini quiz every day and it's self-corrected online and our learning management system so we don't have to deal with that but it helps the students develop a certain level of vocabulary and basic conceptual knowledge that when we do have our synchronous meeting times when we meet face to face with them it's in a teleconferencing structure we're able to pull that part and go deeper into the information so evaluation is going to change a lot we can have those traditional tools but we can extend this type of formative evaluation structures that we've become accustomed to to go beyond things like just using embedded formative assessment in which we have the evaluation criteria inside the activity for example if you do something like debate debate is an activity but it can be assessed right so that this is embedded inside of our classroom structure so you're not setting off a separate time to evaluate it's actually part of the learning experience right so it's embedded within our classroom structure but we can go beyond that into this idea of you know from feed back to feed forward instead of you know let me tell you what you did wrong it's actually you know with this basic focus of okay we've got this we're at this stage now what do we do so let's plan for so it actually changes the entire concept of assessment to being something that is a teaching tool it's not just something that happens at the end of learning but that it's a beginning middle and end and that's something that shapes the way that we grow that's what learning is if we all knew everything you know we get a hundred on everything that'd be nice but it means that we didn't learn anything right so in order to learn we need to make mistakes and there needs to be that space for mistakes and our assessment structures have to sort of bake that in there's many more tools for differentiated assessment and evaluation online than there are in face-to-face structures and we're going to share a lot of those with you when we meet in class the eighth point has to do with reflection reflection on our part as teachers reflection on the part of students it's kind of the white space in a in a book right you need that resting period to be able to take stock what did I really learn you know what went on here did I really get something out of that last piece of information right so incorporating and baking into the your instructional design the space for reflection is huge and we spent so much time thinking we're so behind in our curriculum we have to just catch up we don't have enough time for reflection believe me and the five minutes invested in reflection at the end of a class can weigh 10 times as much as just bombarding the students with additional information having that downtime is incredibly important as far as consolidating learning and understanding the ninth point has to do with independent learning remember we talked about having activities that have a balance between independent learning activities and collaborative activities well this has more to do with an attitudinal structure being able to self-motivate is huge we have a lot of research in the learning sciences for example moffat in 2011 showed that a student's self-regulation accounts for almost twice as much as innate intelligence so you know being born smart is really cool but actually being able to self-regulate accounts for almost twice as much in terms of learning outcomes within school settings so being able to help a kid self-regulate be an independent learner is huge and even more so when we're going online being able to give them choice facilitating or guiding them or nudging them in the right directions towards activities having enough resources a variety of resources that permits that within this framework of an instructional design that lends itself to that is huge in terms of long-term life skills not only for academic understanding and finally evaluation we talked about assessing where a student might be well now we want to talk about evaluation structures and we know that anything a human learns can be disaggregated into knowledge you know dates facts formulas googleable stuff right skills the ability to apply that knowledge and attitudinal changes which has a lot to do with values and those characteristics of that individual that perseverance they have or whatever so we know that anything that we teach in school settings can be explained or can be defined as a knowledge or skill or an attitude what we do know really clearly is that it doesn't take a lot of time to memorize knowledge and it's easy to evaluate it's much harder to and takes a lot more time to instill attitudinal change to get people to stop having certain biases to get people to appreciate teamwork as being beneficial to them changing attitudes takes time and it's also a lot more difficult to evaluate and we're going to talk a lot about that within our live class because these are some of the things that are more challenging to us it's a very different mentality to think about education as being just you know transferring knowledge which is really kind of easy and kids have it on their phones these days so you know if you spend a lot of time at that level it's probably it's not the best use of your time kids can learn knowledge by themselves they don't need to teacher they have their phones but they cannot learn the skill sets how to apply that knowledge without guidance and modeling and they will never gain a change in attitudes without our help so we need to find a way to design our courses in which we can offload some of those knowledge-based memoristic types of things and let technology do some of that for us for example we can flip the classroom and include a lot of the information that are basically the dates facts formulas names of people theories we can put that on a video beforehand so that when we get together in class we can actually do things with it we can practice those skill sets and we can take the time to shape those attitudinal shifts that we're hoping to gain so all of this is to say that there's this balance when you're going to think about a blended learning structure in instructional design we have a lot of synchronous things that occur we have asynchronous activities that occur we have all kinds of goals that we might have that have not changed anywhere from last year's goals to this year's goals our modality has changed though so we're doing these things in a different set of structures than we might have before so we have to sort of buy into that shift and modality hang on to the core roots of great teaching but then also learn about these steps on how to design our classes in the best way possible to meet all of those objectives so let's look at an example when we're designing something new for the first time some of you are putting together an online course for the first time in your life so one of the ways that we know that the human brain learns best is by having worked examples so if you have an example there it's easy to sort of edit and decide well i don't want that i do want the other thing as opposed to just starting from scratch so don't take this as what you have to do but do take it for something that you might want to consider using and there's another video within this class structure that gives you a tour of the inside of this class but this is sort of the background and sort of understanding the logic of why we did this so initially we want students to have you know a basic foundational understanding of the information have this groundwork we want them to then explore we want them to connect and have reflection on things and we want to then give them the opportunity to relearn if they need to right so in this groundwork stage we give a pre-class video this means our class is flipped so we give the information in a video before the class happens and so the point of that is that they understand these core concepts this basic knowledge level things right some of the vocabulary some of the main theories that are going on in the class there and that's done at an individual level people can watch that anytime they want to from home right then they do this asynchronous work which is that they are encouraged to explore the bundles so that curated mini library for the topic and to take a quiz now the quiz is totally based on the video and so if you watch the video you could just do the quiz and get 100 we don't care how many times you take the quiz you could take it a hundred times we just want you to get a score of 100 on that test that really makes a difference to us as far as being able to share common knowledge when they come into the live class setting okay and also before they come to that live class we begin to have that building of the community by creating juicy discussion board prompts and asking them to reply to each other okay so initially we want them just to respond to think about to reflect on on the prompt that has to do with the topic of the week and write their initial response and then we meet we have the face-to-face synchronous meeting in this particular class it's in zoom and in the course on Harvard we meet for two hours and so what do we do we use the discussion board prompts that the students have already written as a jumping off point for what we do in the live class so based on their reflections and their ideas and their concerns and their questions that come up within the discussion board we use that to centralize the conversation of the live class that's the essence of flipping that's why it's so powerful because you can get this factual information done in one place but actually apply the information and go deeper within your own context in this other phase okay so when we're live in the synchronous class in zoom in this face-to-face meeting we really pull apart those concerns that showed up on the discussion board at the end of the live encounter we have a three two one reflection three things you didn't know beforehand two things you're curious or interested about want to know more and one thing you might change about your personal professional life based on that information taking the time at the end of the live class to do that is really important in that moment you have a whole lot of ideas going you have a lot of notes all over the place but you haven't ordered them so this gives you a few minutes to write six sentences to consolidate that and what's fascinating is that we we keep track of these over the course of the semester and at the end of the semester we share the sort of the groups three two ones all together and it's a very powerful moment to see wow look at all the things I learned and look at all the things I was curious about and look at all those promises I made to myself and then you compare them with other students and then you really take and own the material of that class by doing something like that within that live class encounter we do a lot of things with breakout rooms so these small group activities where we give students a prompt or a challenge and we put them into small groups of maybe three or four so they're able to have that personalized time to know each other better but also to speak and to go deeper into the information after we do that we do these group deep dives with sections and with additional workshops so we have normally scheduled weekly sections so if we're talking about the mind body connection in this class by the way the class is called the neuroscience of learning it's an introduction to mind brain health and education if we're doing the unit is on the mind body connection we've talked globally about how the body and the mind are connected and how they work together our section for that week for example is on sleep we do a deep dive into one of the areas of that main topic of the week then now those things are done at a group level okay then after that what's so special about this class in which gets to these points of evaluation that i wanted to bring up to you is that we spend a lot of time using feedback so people give responses to each other on the discussion board so they get feedback from peers but then we also allow students to retake the quiz as i said before you know a hundred times if they want to perfect it but all of the written work in our class the discussion boards which are graded or their short written assignments for example which are graded they get the chance to rework that why because we know that anybody who can learn from their mistakes should be able to benefit from that right so if we've taken the time to give feedback on something and they've sort of bought into that and they learn from their mistakes we want to regrade that and so we regrade that with a 10% deduction for timeliness but it does give them the opportunity to learn from their mistakes and that is something that we worked into our instructional design to give a lot more weight to the role of evaluation assessment and feedback than normally happens within a course structure which is usually activities instruction and activities instruction well we spend a lot more time saying learn from the feedback and that's a very different design which we hope some of you will incorporate because it's been very very powerful we also have the space where we meet with students in our office hours and that's open to them we have set office hours but we also say you can ask for a time to meet by email if you'd like and we try to accommodate as many of those students as possible so we do create multiple points for the communication to be very very clear and easy to understand we try to have very clear expectations at the beginning within the syllabus but also the course design is designed by modules and each module has a similar structure and to see that we're going to be looking at a video tour of the class shortly so the final piece to all of this which is a longer-term thing that has a lot to do with that shift in attitudes we talked about you you can do knowledge and skills pretty quickly in a couple hours you can learn knowledge and skills but it kind of takes a lifetime to change attitudes about things right so one of the things to build up perseverance to build up this general growth mindset to have resiliency to learn intellectual humility i can learn from my mistakes we have a semester long project and the students choose some area that they want to go into that has to do with our subject matter it's of their choice they have to develop a great research question and then in five different submissions throughout the semester they accumulate the information and then present it at the end and so basically this allows the students to have a much more long-term vision on the information as well so that deep dive is is done at an individual level so that's basically the structure of the neuroscience of learning and introduction to mind-brain health and education psychology 1609 at harvard universities extension school that i've had the honor of teaching for the past seven years and over the past five years we've done this a hundred percent online in this format and we've tweaked it slowly but surely along the way and got a lot of great feedback from our students who do say that this is a personalized way to do this so we feel the course is very well structured because mainly the the feedback that we get from the students at the end of the semester really is encouraging and it makes us feel confirmed that the instructional design was well laid out and this is something that we wanted to share with you so if you would like to take the tour in canvas of how this looks you can do that and you can also explore our class right now in Moodle because we've tried to replicate as close as we can in a different LMS the exact same structures so as you recall just before i mentioned that everything that a human learns or that we learn within school can be categorized either into knowledge skills or or attitudes and one of the things that's really clear about the way that this instructional design worked was that we use different tools to measure these different levels of educational competencies and we're going to talk a lot about that because that has so much to do with the instructional design that we're focused on okay so with that what did we do just now we tried to contextualize all of this this idea of instructional design within this idea of understanding our content knowledge understanding how to teach now how do we leverage technology and how do we use things from the learning sciences to sort of have that balance that perfect balance to have that great class we defined instructional design and then we looked at some of these standards or the steps that you could use to structure your own classroom setting and then we looked at this last work model so now the work is on you so what we want you to do is to take the information from this video think about each of those different steps do a little bit of pre-planning in your own head so that when we're together we're going to talk about any specific questions you might have and to look at how you actually pull all of that together how do you do the pre-class videos in a flipped classroom how do you create a bundle for a specific topic where do you get that information how can it really all be free what kinds of questions are appropriate for the quiz you know to reinforce vocabulary so we'll go deeper into that when we're all together and so with that looking forward to seeing you if you have any questions beforehand please send me an email within our classroom structure that would be great so that we can keep track of where everything is and and looking forward to creating some wonderful instructional design with you thanks