Instructional-Design

Treadmills are iconic pieces of exercise equipment for the wrong reason. They’re famous primarily for sitting unused in basements and spare bedrooms all across the country. These treadmills go unused despite having some pretty sophisticated features, including embedded video trainers who talk to you during your workout, realistic imagery of running routes, automated speed and incline adjustment to match the imagery you’re seeing, and even a “cruise control for your heart” that monitors your heart’s beats per minute and adjusts the difficulty of your run in real-time to keep you in your target heart-rate zone throughout your workout. However, all the amazing features in the world can’t improve your fitness level if you never get on the treadmill and use them, which apparently many owners don’t. ...

[caption id=“attachment_7070” align=“alignright” width=“167”] https://cheezburger.com/8016802816.[/caption] Do you know the #nailedit meme? In its most common form: Someone sees a recipe or craft online. They try to recreate it. Things go terribly, comically wrong. They graciously post the results online, allowing us all to take joy in the degree to which they absolutely #nailedit. Part of what makes these memes great is that they’re so relatable. Everyone has been there - faithfully (we believe) following a recipe or other set of instructions (looking at you, Ikea), only to have things go horribly wrong. It really can be difficult to get the desired results even when you’re following a step-by-step recipe with illustrations. ...

I’ve been writing this article 30 minutes here and 60 minutes there for several months (Wordpress tells me I saved the first bits in March). I’ve probably deleted more than is left over. It’s time to click Publish and move on. This article started out with my being bothered by the fact that ‘OER adoption reliably saves students money but does not reliably improve their outcomes.’ For many years OER advocates have told faculty, “When you adopt OER your students save money and get the same or better outcomes!” That claim is fine enough if your primary purpose is saving students money (which feels like the direction that OER and ZTC degree advocates have been moving for some time now, and explains why I don’t feel like I’m part of that community any more). But if your primary purpose is improving student outcomes, the shrugging “sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t” uncertainty is utterly unacceptable. So I’ve been thinking more than I’d care to admit about the relationship between OER and improving student outcomes. This thinking, with all the benefit that hindsight affords, doesn’t always reflect well on some of my earlier research. But that’s no reason not to share it. ...

Recently I’ve been thinking about the difference between an informational resource and an educational resource. I’ve had the sense that an educational resource is an informational resource with a little something extra and have enjoyed coming back to this thought again and again over the last several weeks, trying to reduce this “something extra” to its simplest form. Keeping the discussion informal, it seems that an informational resource is simply a compilation or collection of information - ideas, facts, processes, procedures, &c. I think of an encyclopedia as being the quintessential information resource - comprehensive, accurate, and well-organized. If you accept that definition (for sake of this argument), what would need to be added to an informational resource to make it an educational resource? ...