Writing Objectives

Earlier this year, I had the opportunity to help a department chair I work with create and revise course objectives for a variety of courses.  During this time, I knew what the purpose of class objectives were, but never knew how in depth these objectives should be.  As we were working on the objectives, the department chair was in a time crunch to get the data entered and submitted.   Because of the time crunch, the department chair seemed to just be entering random text and not realizing the purpose of the objectives.

Looking back at this experience, I realize that the objectives for a course are very important, and that it should take time and a few revisions to make sure that the objective is clearly stated.

Instructional Design applied

Last week I had the opportunity to attend an advisor conference in Orlando, Florida.  I was excited to attend this conference to learn more about advising issues that are going on throughout the country, as well as to observe the presentations and see how they fit with what I’m learning in class.

The first thing that I tried to keep in mind as I attended the breakout sessions was the following:  “Is this session something that training can take care of?”  Some of the sessions I went to fit the description great, and was definitely something that training needed to fix, others were more of pure information, while a few were just boring in and of themselves. 

When getting ready to go to the breakout sessions, I would read the description about the session, and then try to see if the description really fit.  Some of the presenters were right on…while others were way out in left field from what the description said.  Also, I could tell which presenters started with the “end in sight” and those that just “threw it together.”

The one breakout session that really caught my mind, started with the end in sight.  This presentation was titled “Fast Pass Treatment:  Staff Retreats are Worth the Price of an ‘E-Ticket’.”  This course first caught my attention because of the words “STAFF RETREAT.”  It has been a long time since I have attended a staff retreat and was something that I was really interested in.  I also thought that this topic is definitely something that training or teaching could fix.  A lot of companies plan on having what they call staff retreats, but in the end they all turn out to be really long and boring staff meetings.  The ladies that presented on this topic definitely had specific goals and objects that they wanted to cover, as well as handouts and a CD for each audience member with templates, games, agendas, and everything else that a newbie would need to plan a great staff retreat.

I was excited to see that with great planning and preparation the tools that we are learning about can be applied outside the classroom setting.

Learning Theories

This week our group had to present an article on Learning Theories.  I thought the timing of this article was perfect, because this week was our first Learning Theories debate in our other course.  It was a great learning tool to help the class interact and talk about the learning theories of Behaviorism, Cognitivism, and Constructivism.

Here is just a brief description of how learning occurs in the three learning theories that we discussed in class.

Behaviorism:      Learning occurs when there is a change in either the form or frequency of observable performance.  Behaviorist look at a stimulus, a response, and the association between the two. 

Cognitivism:       Cognitivist look at the acquisition of knowledge and internal mental structures.  The look to see what’s going on inside the black box that behaviorist do not attend to.  Learning occurs when there are changes between states of knowledge, rather than the probability of response.

Constructivism: This is an objective approach to learning.  Constructivism equate learning with creating meaning from experience.  This is a branch of Congnitivism.  Constructivists believes that the mind filters input from the world to produce its own reality. 

This is just some of the fun stuff that we are learning in our courses thus far.  I must admit, I like the hands on approach to things, like our Final project, compared to readings that I just don’t understand.  Stay tuned for information about our group project, “How to Perform CPR”, and all the stages that are associated with it.