Why do I find this so interesting? Well, by reviewing what others propose to submit to conferences and what they write and submit for publication helps me better understand what people within the field work on and I can see where the field is going – I learn what others are interested in. I also learn what standards they hold and what research they are conducting. Knowing this helps me plan my own research and to stay current in the field. I learn the “big” names and whose work to immerse myself more into for further learning.

I love writing. Engaging deeply in reading what others write and from writing several book chapters, journal articles, and conference proposals I have learned a lot. I can identify good writing and continuously strive to write well myself. My writing has definitely improved immensely from reading scholarly work, from practicing writing, and from getting feedback from my professors and peers on my writing. Because of this, I also thoroughly enjoy providing constructive feedback to others to help improve their writing and in an extension the general audience experience. It’s a purely positive cycle!

This past week I looked at competency-based curriculum from a system’s perspective. I had to remind myself that as an instructional designer I am pragmatist while reviewing some of the literature. As a pragmatist I can say that “it might work if…” or “it might work but…” and I can design as I am asked to design with the theoretical framework given but when I feel that it doesn’t quite work then I can bring in some other idea and try make it work. I don’t have to look through just one lens – which is all good. Instructional design is, after all, not a predictable process, because over time we have come to realize that people are not predictable (like behaviorists wanted to have it), but learning is more of a situated process adapted to fit the moment and the learner in focus.

Competency-based curriculum allows students to learn skills but also to apply their learning in real-life like ways – within context (RSA, n.d.). The curriculum has been used to quite some extent within medical school such as when preparing students become ready for their physician residency, and within nursing, but also in psychiatry, and economics. Albanese, Mejicano, Anderson, and Gruppen (2010) note that it “requires careful planning, preparation, and a long-term commitment from everyone involved in the educational process.” This sounds time-consuming and it is. Buy-in is expected from everyone and I think most of us know how hard that can be. Even just one faculty teaching with lower expectations or with leaner grading can jeopardize the entire program the curriculum is implemented in.

In competency-based curriculum the idea is that learners shall make connections and apply learning as per constructivist means, having the curriculum building blocks guide the process as they build on existing knowledge. Faculty functions as facilitators in the process but within medical school, Albanese et al. (2010) note that it is hard for faculty to find the time to supervise and assess learners in the real as they are heavily burdened themselves being practitioners. The application part is a must because without it, how can physicians become competent physicians? In Albanese et al.’s study the competency-based curriculum helps learners prepare for their residency rather than preparing them as physicians. i.e. it provides them the basics of what they need to know – levels them to a competency level set as an entry goal to residency. Learners have to demonstrate that they achieved competency at all levels along the way.

This all sounds good, so what is the hatch? Albanese et al. (2010) note that there is a large challenge in slicing the curriculum so that it becomes manageable. Once this is done the students competence, with each chunks or levels, needs somehow to be assessed. Who decides how it is to be assessed? How is it going to be assessed? Is it a pass/fail concept? Can it be measured on a scale? What should the scale look like? Who determines that the learner has reached competence? What is competence anyway? How do learners pace through the curriculum? Are there time limits to how long they can try for competence? What happens if they fail? Since we already determined that humans are not predictable, can more than one instructor determine if someone passes or fails? What if life happens and a learner has personal problems, illness, etc. and is unable to self-pace? Will someone take note and consult? What implications does it have on facilitators, the program, the school, the greater environment of the community if someone fails or gets a pass grade without having passed the competencies?

With so many questions noted why would anyone want to implement competency-based curriculum? Albanese et al. (2010) take a humoristic approach as they say “If student growth does not make you ecstatic, there is not much else to get excited about because a competency-based curriculum is really more of a quality control mechanism that functions by giving students greater control over their education. Quality control and relinquishing control are not things most faculty get ecstatic about.”

How does this fantastic environment look like as a system? Well, let’s take Albanese et al.’s (2010) physicians as an example. There is the learner in the center given control through the designed curriculum. Learners should pass through the curriculum but also be able to – at least ideally – test out if they bring with them vast amount of applicable practical and theoretical knowledge. There are the instructors assigned as facilitators, mentors, guides, assessors. Everyone has to teach to the curriculum so assessment is fair and the competency is equally measured. To achieve this everyone who teaches and assesses the learners need continuous training to stay on the same level and use the same principles. This training, and indeed the entire program, needs a strong support from administration and funds made available from the school. As students reach proficiency the school and community needs to make available residency positions for the learners. In a national perspective we are in dire need of these physicians and practitioners that have chosen to become part of a profession that according to Albanese et al. is facing a serious shortfall.

As I started off, there really is no ideal way of designing curriculum. So much has to be considered: the learner, the teacher, the cognitive levels, the situation, the goals by the individual learner as well as the program, the institution, the community, and the nation. All pieces are interconnected and should be seen as such. It should not be about the individual going through the motions in a program striving for some letters to place in front of their name – it should be about learning, change, understanding, building a better world for those coming after us. Not everyone sees it as such. There are too many students that get passing grades that do not deserve them and I see it is not just the fault of the instructors – it is part of a system failure where goals and outcomes for programs and institutions require instructors to pass even the weak because sometimes the students we get are not the ones with a passion to learn but those that are weak. Here is where I see the competency-based curriculum as dangerous: When there is no whole-hearted system buy-in – When students become numbers of graduates in reports submitted upward to the bigger system rather than really competent graduates leaving a program contributing to our and our children’s shared future.

Feel free to disagree – the comment box is there for this very purpose.

Albanese, M. A., Mejicano, G., Anderson, W. M., & Gruppen, L. (2010). Building a competency-based curriculum: The agony and the ecstasy.
RSA. (n.d.). Opening Minds. Retrieved from http://www.rsaopeningminds.org.uk/about-rsa-openingminds/

Poster presentation at AERA April 9, 2011

Once the paper was accepted I learned about the interrogation that novice graduate students may encounter from researchers experienced in the ways of the world. I was glad I had been happily ignorant of this when submitting the paper and made sure I knew my stuff so that I could defend my numbers and explain every which corner of what I had done and how I had come to the conclusions I had. No cloud was going to darken my excitement over being able to attend and present at AERA!

I arrived to NOLA on Thursday last week, the day before the conference and took a bus tour through the city. It was fascinating to see the levee 9 area and hear our tour guide talk about the breech and the rebuilding. He himself said he was almost done re-building his own house. Only had a few more doorposts to put in… And this was in 2008. Would he move somewhere else? No – like many others New Orleans is his home and he just isn’t going anywhere else to live. This city doesn’t have bad neighborhoods – it has good or bad streets. People live here together.

Friday April 8 the AERA conference started and I figured out how the program book of 494 pages worked. Once I did I got so excited.  This is the THE conference that the people whose papers I have read and refer to in my own research papers attend. I was actually going to be able to meet and talk to people whose work I admire and hear what research they are currently working on. How exciting is that! This resulted in me practically running between presentations to be able to attend as much as possible and at the same time spend time to talk to people and connect. 14,000 AERA visitors and several other conferences in NOLA at the same time resulted in a super slow wireless and so tweeting was pretty much out, but that of course left me more time to write notes and enjoy active listening instead of splitting my brain between listening and technology.

Saturday during the cocktail hour was the poster presentation and I was ready. The poster looked really great. I had gotten some great advice from Michael Mensik, a doctoral candidate at University of Minnesota, on how to create a good AERA poster and I even learned Illustrator in the process. A little nervous about mailing the expensive 4 x 6 feet sized poster I still preferred this option from risking not being allowed to bring it onboard the Southwest flight I had booked. Fedex did their job and the poster arrived the same day as I did so all was well. I also brought with me tri-fold brochures and prints of the paper. The brochures had the abstract and the references and I handed these out to anyone passing by. Those that stopped to read I asked if they wanted me to walk them through the study and gave them my five minute presentation. Michael Mensik had suggested a 2 – no more than 4 minute presentation but people that stopped to listen were all very interested and asked follow-up questions as well, so I think it worked well. Dr. Warren and a few of the other doctoral students from our program that also attended the conference were great moral support as they socialized close by. Knowing they were there was all I needed. I did get lots of visitors and I did get that one researcher that had a few questions that were hard – but I picked up my notes from when I had crunched my numbers, showed and explained why I had done what I had done, come up with my alpha, and the scale I had used and he was satisfied. Now that felt really good and Leila had had nightmares for no reason! I knew my stuff!

I so enjoyed the conference and being able to connect with many great people as well as with the other seven doctoral students from our program that attended the meeting. Dr. Warren presented three other papers of which I was able to attend two before I headed back to DFW on Monday evening.  I am now so inspired to finish my current research and send in for consideration for next year’s conference in Vancouver, Canada. If I make it there, I will certainly be less of a novice. Maybe I can even help someone else get ready like Dr. Warren, Dr. Knezek, Michael, and Leila helped me.

Next year SITE will be held in Austin. We, the ECMP students that attended at SITE this year, talked enthusiastically about how nice it was to be there together as a team. We socialized and supported each other, got to know each other in a new way, and the whole experience brought us closer generating a form of glue. What a great bunch of doc students! For next year, I want to make further efforts to get even more of the doc students engaged with writing proposals so that we get a chance to go again with even more of us doc students from the ECMP program presenting.  
 

Leila Mills, Anjum Najmi, and myself presented at SITE March 8th:
“Validating the Computer Attitude Quationnaire CAQ N/I”
Our paper won a SITE Award. In the picture from the left:
Dr. Christenson, Anjum Najmi, Leila Mills, Jenny Wakefield, and Dr. Knezek
Dean Surface was also an author on the paper but was unable to join us.

In May 2002 I decided I wanted to become an instructional designer to help faculty develop online learning. I still have the job ad in a folder neatly tucked away with a copy of my application for a position I was much unqualified for. It required a Masters degree and I wasn’t even finished with my AAS. But – it was my first encounter with the job titled “Instructional Designer” and it sparked a fire in me, a passion – to become one. The dream hasn’t died – but I now have a dilemma:

Now nine years after I first saw the job positing I have degrees out my ears: AA, AAS, BAAS, and a MS. Indeed, my journey isn’t even complete: Today I am working on my Ph.D. with a degree plan as carefully chosen as all my previous degree plans: targeting my areas of interest: web design, graphic design, and instructional design. After nine years I have evidence from 6 credit hours that I took instructional design courses (admittedly with another 6 hours in the works). An unwise choice in my undergraduate courses leads me to not be able to get a certificate in Instructional Design at UNT, also therefore was I unable to get a my Masters Degree in Instructional Design: I took one course I wanted to take in my Bachelor’s instead of saving it for my Master!

Meanwhile, what is an instructional designer anyway? In short, he or she is a person who designs and develops effective, efficient, and memorable learning. He or she is sometimes, a teacher or instructor as well, teaching courses or provides training. But not always. Using technology tools and proven learning theories the instructional designer, however, almost always helps develop learning modules, courses, or training for others.

Today something happened that cast a big shadow over my dream. The event made me much at unease and I stopped to wonder if the instructional design paradigm has perhaps shifted while I, in my mad dash to reach into the field, had been studying. Had it perhaps eluded me that I was in fact running a dead race? Perhaps we not need instructional designers in higher education anymore?

Faculty is very competent today in technology, much more so than ten years ago. They use the computers daily for email, online discussion boards, learning management systems, graphics, video, and all kinds of web2.0 tools. They carry cell phones that allow them access to the Internet, social media, and resources. For work they log into complicated systems to manage students, check their pay stub, update their website, go through mandated annual training etc. etc. Training is more than ever available online and faculty is asked to train themselves and to design their own courses, sometimes in collaboration with their students as they progress through semesters.

So tell me – do we need instructional designers in higher education? If you are an educator reading this, please leave a comment and say if you think there is still a need for instructional designers within higher education helping teachers create effective, efficient, and memorable learning. Or is it a position we can do without?

Does an avatar still exist when you log out from the virtual world?

This weekend I have been exploring ideas of philosophy – the love to wisdom. Philosophy can roughly be split into nine areas: logic, epistemology, metaphysics or ontology, science theory, language philosophy, value theory, ethics, esthetics, and religious philosophy. I took a closer look at epistemology and ontology. Philosophy as a whole, deals with the thought processes we have as humans, the knowledge, the perception of reality, true truth, and perceived truth.

Epistemology

Epistemology is knowledge theory or knowledge about knowledge. Knowledge can briefly be described as true justified belief. In a nutshell, as humans we have ideas on how things are (our beliefs) and what is true. Seen as two intertwining circles, one for the ideas and one for the beliefs, where they overlap, we have knowledge. I like this visualization as it provides for a great picture for visual learners like me. Wikipedia points out that there are three expectations for knowledge to be called knowledge: “A knows p if and only if (1) p is true, (2) A is convinced that p is true and (3) A has good, sufficient or forced reasons to believe p to be true” (Wikipedia, 2010).

Ontology

Ontology is interesting in the aspect that it is a conceptualization. It involves the existence of things that we cannot prove but can perceive are things in the world. Under its umbrella are thus the things we can imagine do exist in the world, the phenomenon we can imagine are in place, and perceptions that together with human logic allows us to shape concepts of what the world we live in is really like. Wikipedia suggests four categories: Physical objects, psychological things like thoughts and perceptions, abstract things, and phenomena on the edge of our perceptional limits.

In the world of instructional design, ontology would work almost like taxonomy or a specification. Specific words are designed to describe certain things or ideas. These are then agreed upon by others who buy into the ontology: Seen, for example, as a complicated collection of ideas by a 3-D world developer, the design ideas are worked out into ‘things’ or ‘perceptions of things’. A persona walking around in a virtual space becomes an avatar as people agree upon the naming convention. An avatar – present and moving around in the virtual world as we are logged into the environment – provides for an experience. We can see the avatar with our own eyes. We can maneuver it. It is real. It exists. We name the sense of ‘being’ in the virtual world presence. However, once we log off – is the avatar still an avatar in the 3-D world? Is it still real and does it still have presence even though we cannot see it? What distance is there between the avatar and our conceptualization of the avatar? Are we ready to accept the existence of the avatar phenomena – the avatar we cannot see – as real? Ontology is an interesting “description [..] of the concepts and relationships that can exist for an agent or a community of agents” (Gruber, n.d.).

Gruber, T. (n.d.). What is an ontology? Retrieved from http://www-ksl.stanford.edu/kst/wjat-is-an-ontology.html

Wikipedia.(2010). Ontologi. Retrieved from http://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ontologi

Wikipedia. (2010) Kunskapsteori. Retrieved from http://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kunskapsteori

This first week of CECS 6510 Dr. Knezek had us look at correlations using Pearson Correlations, reliability and validity computing Cronbach Alpha to measure internal consistency, and effect size using Cohen’s D. What kicks me is that it is fascinating to me and I only want to read more about it. Who would have thought? Having my own set of data to try it all out on later on is very motivating to me.

So what are these *things* I mentioned?

Correlations reflect the relationship between variables. Continuous variable are things like height, weight, income, speed, or test scores. Discrete variables are race, social class, affiliation etc. Direct correlations change in the same direction and Indirect correlations change in opposite or negative direction. Here it doesn’t really matter if the value you get is negative or positive. It’s the number that is important. -.70 is larger than .50. The value reflects on the variability shared between the variables i.e. what they have in common. Numbers to keep in mind:

.8 to 1.0 very strong
.6 to .8 strong
.4 to .6 moderate
.2 to .4 weak
.0 to .2 weak or no relationship

Internal consistency is measured using Chronbach Alpha. It’s a test of reliability we can use when we want to know if variables include items that are consistent with one another. It is a unidimentional scale representing only one dimension or construct. The values to pay attention to are:

.9 excellent
.8 getting better
.7 good
.6 and less not sure if to keep

For homework we had a data set to look at and run Cronbach Alpha on. Cronbach says not to mix pre-test with the post test on the same person so to exclude that from happening we were to run the test excluding test 1 (pre-test) or test 3 (post test).

My unchanged values on the 1-12 showed a Cronbach of .89

Test 1 values on 1-12 showed .89
Test 3 values showed .91

Broken up on the three different parts of questions of the career interest questionnaire:

Test 1 question 1-4 .83
Test 3 question 1-4 .83

Test 1 question 5-9 .91
Test 3 question 5-9 .94

Test 1 question 10-12 .65
Test 3 question 10-12 .7

Pretty good results on that questionnaire except perhaps on test questions 10-12 test 3 where Cronbach alpha sank below seven. Then there were only 3 questions and five would really have been recommended.

Cohen’s D lets us figure out effect size. It lets us look at how many standard diviations one group is from another. To do this we simly take the means of both the groups and subtract. This can be, for ecample, males vs females and the means of each the groups. Then we divide by the pooled SD. To get the pooled SD we take the SD for both groups together. Divide the number we got from the subtraction with the pooled SD and there it is: Cohen’s D – the magnitude of effect size.

.2 small
.5 medium
.8 large

Statistics to be continued through-out the summer…

Dr. Scott J. Warren was invited as a guest lecturer for a Metta Alsobrook’s seminar of 83 engineering students at UT Dallas on March 11^th, 2010. I held an introduction to Second Life and how UT Dallas got their three new islands in August 2009, and what we are currently doing with these islands: Undergraduate students have been teamed with campus clients to develop content for the clients on the islands and at the same time learn the emerging technology and create competitive portfolio for themselves for the future. I developed the program called Students Second Life Success and am running it during spring semester.  

The Emerging Ethical Issues in Virtual Worlds presentation was held real-time also in Second Life in the 4-corner auditorium joining the simulations Comet Island, Temoc Island, Excellence Island, and School of Management Island. Dr. Warren was speaking through his avatar and some of the students were logged in. I counted a total of 25 avatars participating in-world.

Dr. Warren, Assistant Professor in the department of Learning Technologies at The University of North Texas with a Ph.D. in Instructional Systems Technology from Indiana University-Bloomington, well experience with virtual worlds and gaming, brought up interesting and thought-provoking questions through-out his presentation about game addiction, questioning if we should, and conserations if we do decide to develop education using games and simulations. This is Dr. Warren’s recent research area. In his doctoral work he built the Anytown virtual space in the Virtual Reality game Quest Atlantis and studied student literacy learning in this space. The UTD students, mostly Freshmen and sophomores, were very engaged in discourse as they gathered in groups to discuss and then reflect on their group discussions for class and the in-world audience. Many had experienced game addiction or had friends with game addiction.

Images from the 4-corner auditorium in second Life during the presentation are posted here.

Patrick, Sherrie, and I finished a Machinima today presenting our course development. We will present this to our class. I am uploading it over-night as I write. We had so much fun working together on this project I will miss them both dearly. I will also miss their help as I move on to finish up the remaining 12 modules of Dr. Byrd’s online course in Educational Psychology, the one we have been developing four modules of as a team. It sure was great to work in a team. Course development takes a lot of time.

Dr. Byrd has a possibility to teach this course online this coming summer. The summer semester though is 8 weeks as oppose to 16 weeks. I think I will have a rough job ahead of me not only designing the remaining weeks of course work but also leveling it out to less weeks. This is an interesting and very useful process for me. I’m loving every minute, especially since I get to practice on the Moodle, SLoodle, and implement instruction leveraging Second Life .

We’re wrapping up our online course design for Dr. Byrd. The design document with its job aids and screen shots is a great documentation of our hard work. I am very pleased with what we have accomplished. The implementation of the modules into the Moodle and Sloodle went well. I still do have some Sloodling to do. Have to figure out if the quiz chair actually won’t work with this version of the Moodle like I hear from others, or if I am doing something wrong.

Dr. Byrd got an email from us today with questions to help her evaluate our work. BSU students went through the Scavenger Hunt and the Dominoes game yesterday and provided feedback through the Google Form we set up. I am hoping some of our UNT students will jump at the opportunity to run through it as well and give us some additional feedback. We’ll see. I placed a carrot.