Week 4

The first and most important step in the planning stage of instructional design is to clearly define your learning goals and or course objectives. A good course design should echo these intentions. All throughout the design process you should assess your approach to ensure that the course serves to fulfill your students needs and the goals/objectives.

There are many characteristics of a good instructional design that contribute to the quality of a course. Some that come to mind are organization, ease of use and adaptability. No matter the quality of the content being delivered, if the course is difficult to navigate through and the organizational structure is not well thought out, then the overall quality of the course will suffer Also, no two courses are ever the same. I believe that an instructor should always leave room to adapt a course to their students’ needs.

In my proposed eLearning course, I will dedicate a significant amount of attention to the needs of my students because of the nature of the content being taught.  I will need to develop the site and structure the content in a way that is as user friendly as possible because the subject matter could pose to be difficult to follow if not delivered properly. Also, because this is in a sense a pilot course, there are little “proven activity structures” to fall back on. For the most part, everything will be created from scratch including the layout, content and activities.

The primary goals that I have for my course are to effectively convey the content, to make the course enjoyable for the students and to obtain feedback that will be valuable when updating the course for future classes. I plan to assess my students understanding of the content with weekly activities I the hopes that I could monitor their comprehension and identify students that may be struggling early on. Not only will I be demonstrating tasks that the student will need to replicate, but I will also have assignments that give the students the creative freedom to develop their own small projects. From this I should be able to better gauge the experience levels of my students and adapt my course where fit.

The process that I intend on implementing when developing my course is fairly straightforward. I have a good grasp on the range of content that I would like to cover (composing an entire song). Luckily, a song is composed of several components, so I plan to cover each component in a separate weekly segments. Doing so will allow the students to focus on each section separately and cumulatively and ultimately combine all that they’ve learned. My expectation is that the course will be received as a fulfilling experience, given that each student will have a completely original musical piece that they’ve created.

In order to ensure that the students stay on task, I will assign small tasks weekly. I plan to structure the course within Moodle. I prefer Moodle because of its flexibility and ease of use. I have to admit that I haven’t used any other CMS extensively, but Moodle seems to be the least restrictive from what I’ve experienced. Moodle can accommodate most every need that I have for this course including: discussion forums, embedded videos within quizzes and a comprehensive grading database. The only real constraints are the limitations on the layout of the course. As a web-designer I like to have content arranged throughout a page. Moodle is generally based on a top down format, but this is fine for the purpose of the course because it is what most students are accustomed to anyway.

As for the development and testing of the content, as mentioned before, I will have small tasks scattered throughout the course. The students will be tasked to demonstrate their knowledge and upload their files to the server. This will keep the students in the practice of using the software and give me an idea of which students will need additional support. I will not only use these activities to monitor my students, but it will serve as a means for motivating my students through individualized feedback. I will also have one graded comprehensive evaluation. The questions within this assessment will be designed to measure the knowledge based on the basic information covered. There won’t be any strategically phrased questions or tricky multiple-choice questions, just simply stated questions with the idea that either you know it or you don’t. The final evaluation will have to be graded manually. It will be a challenge to set up a rubric for this, being that it will be musical composition that I’ll be grading. I won’t be grading on musical taste or choice of arrangement, rather the demonstrated proficiency of procedures taught and attentiveness to the criteria covered in the course.