The Course Project
This is a project-based course that focuses on a real-world instructional need. The course is designed as a service-learning experience (see below) to support an important social cause. You will gain instructional design experience while developing instructional materials that will be made available for free to adult educators and their learners. While this course is geared to individuals working alone, you are welcome to work on the instructional design project with others, including as part of a class project or practicum in an instructional design program. The following is an overview of the instructional design project.
You are asked to develop open educational resources for Adult Education based on the following project requirements:
- The instructional materials you design and develop will support adult learners who have not completed high school, and are taking adult basic education courses as they prepare for high school equivalency exams (i.e. the GED, HiSET, or TASC tests), or other adult basic education certifications.
- The instruction you design will align with the College and Career Readiness Standards (CCRS) that underlie high school equivalency exams and other adult basic education programs.
- You are able to select the intended grade level and topic of the instruction from the following subject areas:
- English Language Arts and Literacy, including History/Social Studies, Science, and Technical subjects, and
- Mathematics
- The instructional materials you design and develop will:
- conform to the project’s Design Guide,
- be developed within Open Author on OER Commons,
- incorporate guidance for the instructor implementing the lesson,
- include all necessary content presentation, learner practice, and assessment materials for 15-30 minutes of instruction on the standard and topic you have chosen.
- Instructional materials selected for use in Adult Learning Zone group on OER Commons will be licensed under a Creative Commons copyright license as free open educational resources (OER). To ensure the broadest use of your work, we request that you select a Creative Commons CC BY 4.0 license.
- All instructional materials you develop must be open educational resources that (a) our instructors and learners can retain, reuse, revise, remix, and redistribute without additional login or paywall, and (b) can be linked or embedded within Open Author.
Service Learning: Gain Experience for Good
This course is a service-learning experience where you will gain experience for good. Service learning is an educational approach that incorporates academic coursework with opportunities for applied learning. Service-learning is a unique form of experiential learning in that community service is a central component of the experience. A hallmark of service learning is the reciprocal benefit gained by the learner from the experience, and by the community from the service provided.
Course Learning Objectives
By the end of this course, you should be able to conduct the following instructional design processes:
- Analyze: Within Modules 1 and 2, you will analyze key aspects of the design need. In Module 1, you will consider the learners and the the learning context. In Module 2, you will dive into the requirements of the project, including a close examination of the College and Career Readiness Standards. You will also explore and analyze available free and openly licensed open educational resources (OER) that you can adapt to meet the requirements of this project.
- Synthesize: Within Modules 2 and 3, you will make your first attempts at generating possible solutions to meet the instructional design need. You will contemplate established instructional principles to design instructional strategies to support learning.
- Simulate: Within Modules 4 and 5, you will take the ideas swirling in your head and develop draft representations of your design conception. In Module 4, you will offer a representation of your ideas within a written design proposal. This will be followed in Module 5 with your development of a second design iteration, a prototype of your instructional materials based on your written design proposal.
- Evaluate: Within Module 6, you will assess whether your draft design representation (i.e. prototype) is meeting the needs and constraints of this project through self, peer, and expert evaluation activities. Evaluation forces a designer to critically examine the efficacy and efficiency of the instruction in light of the design need.
- Decide: Within Module 7, you will make your final design decisions as you prepare your final deliverable based on the feedback you have received through self, peer, and expert evaluation of your design prototype. As your final assignment in this course, you will submit the instructional materials you have designed and developed. Those who submit final deliverables that meet the design criteria will be invited to include their instructional materials on the Designers for Learning Adult Learning Zone group in OER Commons.