Design+Issues


 * Designing Modules and Topics **

The following are considerations that will help you think about organizing your course with modules and topics in a learning management system.

These considerations are identified as strategies in Robert Marzano's article in Educational Leadership, but they clearly identify what an instructor/designer must consider while planning a course.

Credit:Marzano, R. (2009) Educational Leadership Vol. 67 Issue 2, p86-87, 2p. The following definitions are taken verbatim from Marzano's work.


 * Chunking **

Chunking means presenting new information in small, digestible bites. This requires carefully examining the manner in which students will experience new content. If the teacher intends to present content in the form of a lecture, he or she needs to determine the crucial points at which to pause so students can interact with one another about the new information. For example, for a lecture on the topic of theoretical probability, the teacher might decide to make her first stop after she has discussed some basic differences between theoretical and experimental probability. If she's using a videotape or a video clip she's downloaded from the Internet, she might decide to stop the video about two minutes into the discussion of how theoretical probability is used in games of chance. This idea of stopping so that students can digest the information also holds true for demonstrations, exhibitions, guest speakers, reading content in a textbook, and the like.


 * Scaffolding **

Whereas chunking involves the size of the bites for new content, scaffolding involves the content of the bites and their logical order. To illustrate, let's say that a teacher is showing students a strategy for editing a composition for overall organizational logic. The teacher might organize the steps in that strategy into three chunks. The first chunk would involve steps that deal with determining whether the composition has good transitions from paragraph to paragraph. The second chunk would involve steps that deal with determining whether the major sections of the composition (that is, its beginning, middle, and end) logically flow into one another. The third chunk would involve steps that deal with determining whether the composition as a whole sends a unified message. Each chunk logically sets up the next chunk.


 * Interacting **

Interacting refers to how students process the information in each chunk. One common way to facilitate processing is to organize students in groups and ask each group to summarize the content in the chunk, identify what was confusing, try to clear up the confusion, and predict what information might be found in the next chunk. It's important that as many students as possible respond. Teachers can increase the response rate to questions in several ways. One technique, response chaining, involves having students respond to the answers of other students. Students can agree with, disagree with, or add to a response.


 * Pacing **

As its name implies, pacing involves the extent to which a teacher moves through chunks at an appropriate pace — not too fast and not too slow. The teacher will need to slow down if students do not understand the content in a particular chunk or speed up when student engagement in a chunk begins to wane.


 * Monitoring **

Monitoring involves continually checking for student understanding. If students do not understand the content in a particular chunk, the teacher revisits or reteaches that information before moving on to another chunk.


 * Sequencing **

This strategy is not mentioned in Marzano's article but it is nonetheless an important consideration.

Sequencing is often done by instructors with the help of the table of contents of the chosen textbook for the course. This might be helpful to get started, but it is not the only approach. Sequencing can follow many different organizations.
 * From prerequisite knowledge to higher-order knowledge.
 * From facts to concepts to procedures to application.
 * From one event in time to another in chronological order.
 * From one place in geography to another in spatial order.
 * Any logical order that is suggested by the content.