April 23, 2016 – Lucas Longo

Prompt:

Quick reflection:

What have you learned in terms of new skills and as well as insights through your internship work? What questions has it raised?

Do you have any concerns you would like help with or triumphs to share?

Response:

The internship at VPTL is going well even though I am doing mostly content revision with the occasional multimedia task of creating explanatory diagrams, adding explanatory elements of photos, and doing minor edits on videos. To be fair, I have started to write some content that will go into the course and have been updating the OpenEdX platform itself giving me some interesting insights.

It has been very interesting to see the behind-the-scenes work and organization necessary to create an online course. I am satisfied to see that it was not only a personal perception that it is a daunting task – it really is an extremely labor intensive and meticulous job.

Since the content of the course I am working on is about creating online courses, the content material is of extreme interest. I feel I am killing two birds with one stone.

LOFT Process Guides: Understand Phase.

Techniques: Identify Problems, Preparation

Identify problems
- What problems should the learners be able to solve?
- Subject matter expert develops list of challenging tasks
- Steps:
  - Identify challenging tasks
    - Learning environment will help learner do something they couldn’t do before
  - Create problem typology
    - List all the problems learner must be able to tackle
    - Group problems into categories of similar knowledge and skills required
  - Describe the problem
    - Create problem statement
    - Describe how it sits in the typology
    - How is the problem solved
    - What skills does it require
    - Supporting materials

Presentation: Learning Module Design Understand Phase (benchmark tests and cognitive analysis)

Cognitive task analysis – what specifically should be learned
Workflow
- Identify experts
- Identify cognitively challenging tasks
- Gather data on how expert performs task
- Analyze data
- Represent it
Steps
- What are the project deliverables?
  - Identify what the stakeholders need (including the student of course)
- What is the task?
  - Create a focus statement
- What aspects of expertise do you need to know about?
  - How to identify expert performance?
- Documentation analysis (a.k.a. bootstrapping)
  - Come in with a schema
- Go or no go?
  - If documents describe it all, no need to do full CTA
- What situations will tell you the most about the issue?
- Identify experts
- Identify problems
- Choose CTA method
  - Concept mapping
    - Expert + facilitator + mapper
    - Node and link diagram to map out concepts and relationships
  - Verbal Protocol Analysis (VPA) / Talk-aloud problem solving (TAPS)
    - Talk while solving a problem
    - Code expert’s behavior: “verbal protocol”
  - Guided Experiential Learning (GEL) CTA
    - Interview one expert then validate with 2 other experts
  - Critical Decision Method (CDM)
    - Facilitator + note taker
    - Interview in 4 sweeps
      - Identify good incident story
      - Chronology of good decisions
      - Goals, expectations and cues in each decision
      - Errors novices might make
  - Percursor, Action, Result, Interpretation (PARI)
    - Avionics training environments
    - Experts are interview in pairs
      - One tries to solve the problem
      - Other expert runs the simulation
  - Applied Cognitive Task Analysis (ACTA)
    - Expert describes problem in 4-6 steps
    - Describe what is difficult in each task
    - Present expert with simulation and ask about:
      - Actions
      - Assessments
      - Critical cues
      - Erros
- Write your Preparation Report

Day: April 23, 2016

Internship – Week 4 – Check-in Assignment

Engineering Education – Week 4.2 – Reading Notes