Lifting Burdens

Elder Holland's Testimony of the Book of Mormon

Layers revisited

Representation

What the user sees, hears, feels, etc.

Sensory experience – guides the user through learning

Control

The user input – how they are interacting with the instruction

Message

This is what comes back to the user in the representation layer.

Depends on their control – what they input

Strategy

Contains events (reads the control and sends the appropriate message)

Event: combination of time, space, goal, and activity

Content

Related to the actual goal – what it is that you are trying to teach

Operational principles – how does it work?

These can be socially constructed (think of the connotations that come with specific words, etc.)

What is the set of cause and effect relationships at work here?

Execution (Media Logic or Data Management)

How everything works together (from the instructors point of view)

What if they do the wrong thing at the wrong time? It may damage the students learning experience.

**You can tie it all together by revisiting the instructional design theories we have discussed. Their theories fit into different pieces of the layers-model we have created here. Theorists treat certain layers and ignore other layers.

October 2 - Designing Instruction

EXAMPLE IN CLASS (BOOK)

Representation

Pictures

Sounds

Words on the page

**Notice difference in representations

--Touching a word can say the word, spell it off, or tell you the sounds of the letters

Control Layer

The buttons you can push

Volume, go, stop, etc.

**Notice different levels

STOP GO VOLUME (represents a higher level)

WORDS LETTERS SAY IT (sub-level)

“TOUCH A LETTER TO…” (message layer)

Message Layer

The things the program is saying to you.

Prompts, instructions, hints, etc.

The music speeding up.

**The messages were tailored to his responses

Generating representations according to the users needs/responses

CONVERSATION STRUCTURES

Anything that creates a representation experience is representation. The message that is conveyed to the user comes from the message layer.

Strategy Layer

Hold all the event descriptions & the master plan for instruction

Tells the message layer what kinds of messages/transactions are appropriate depending on the circumstances

Interprets the control layer (input from the user) and then makes a decision of what the next course of action will be

EVENT STRUCTURES

GENERAL STRATEGIC PLANS – event ordering, conversation ordering

**Notice the difference between instructional goals and strategic goals

Instructional goals – what learning you want to take place.

Strategic goals – how you will influence that – how you will get it done.

**The interesting problem/challenge arises because the learner’s instructional and strategic goals may or may not be the same as the instructors goals. As an instructor you must learn what the learners goals are if you hope to adapt your strategy and instructional goals to them.

Content Layer

It’s possible to learn from a model – but it’s more efficient and effective if the model is accompanied by a strategy. The strategy has a plan to help the learner interact with and understand the model.

**Engine Model

Things they could learn:

The order of relations, how parts move

Things they could not learn:

The WHY of the engine – why does it move? What makes it happen?

**Problem with models – we can learn certain things, but we also miss certain things as we look at it.

**Relation to life: how often do we do this? We have some experience and make some connections – but without the bigger pictures (what God can see) we run the risk of coming to the wrong conclusions.

|||||| As instructional designers this is our job. Take a content and design the augmentation – the strategy that will help them have the learning experience with the content. ||||||

TRANSACTION THEORY

Used in computer assisted instruction.

Transaction shell – the actual structure that makes up the actual transaction.

Transaction instance – when you add the information to the shell it becomes an instance.

Transaction Family – all the transaction instances needed to teach a student a particular knowledge or skill to complete a task.