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Module 1: Goal and Task Analysis

Introduction

Whether you are designing Web-based training, textbooks, training videos, or a wide range of other instructional products, as an instructional designer and performance technologist you'll often be called on to design and develop individualized instruction. In this unit, you'll learn to create the most common form of individualized instruction, the tutorial.

Your final project for this unit will be a tutorial on a topic of your choice, developed for delivery as a web-based learning object.

By the time you've completed this first module, you should be able to:

 

Connect

What is individualized instruction?

Sometimes it can be difficult to pin down exactly what we mean by individualized instruction, not least because it is associated with a variety of other terms. Computer assisted instruction (CAI), tutorials, and self-paced instruction are a few of the ideas often associated with individualized learning. We like the term "individualized" because it helps us keep our focus on learners' needs and expectations, which is never a bad thing. But we'll be using some of those other terms as well.

It can be tricky to distinguish individualized instruction from other approaches to teaching and learning, partly because they are often inextricably mixed. Group instruction usually has some individualized instructional elements to it, and vice versa. Nevertheless, in this module, we'll focus on designing instructional products intended primarily for individual learners to use by themselves, for themselves.

What is it used for?

All kinds of learners—from elementary school students to corporate managers—use individualized instruction to acquire new knowledge and skills. Third graders use it to learn rules for long division; workers use it for learning the names of ideas and things associated with their jobs (in the military they call that "nomenclature"); personnel managers use it for improving their hiring processes; you're using it right now to learn some principles of individualized learning itself.

It is particularly useful in the context of distance learning. Individualized instruction is an important element of any e-learning system—corporate, military, or educational.

With care in their design, individualized instructional modules can be appropriate to all types of learning outcomes—facts, concepts, procedures, processes, and principles—and on both the remember and apply levels.

Content-performance matrix (after Clark, 1999).
  Facts Concepts Procedures Processes Principles
Remember          
Apply          

What does it look like?

You'll find designers using a range of instructional strategies for individualized instruction—or individualized learning as we'll often refer to it. Most individualized instruction appears as some form of a tutorial, but you will also find individualized educational simulations and other instructional methods. What they all have in common is:

Instructional modules may be linear—you follow a single path from start to finish—or branching. Branching instruction lets learners skip things they already know, delve more deeply where their interests lie, or remediate difficult content. Intelligent tutoring systems take branching a step further by attempting to track learners' progress through the module and dynamically adjusting instructional parameters such as the number and types of examples and practice items.

Tutorials and other forms of individualized instruction are often presented as a sequence of chunks called instructional "frames." Frames are usually realized as separate computer screens (in CAI) or pages (in a printed book or workbook).

Individualized instruction can wear a variety of guises:

Frequently, individualized learning employs a mix of media, appropriate to the needs of the student and the learning outcomes. It can take place in your kitchen or office, on the Internet or even in a classroom.

Individualized instruction can be part of a formal course—core learning activities or prerequisite, ancillary, or enrichment material—or even be a course all by itself. Sometimes individualized learning is entirely informal, that is, initiated and carried through by an individual outside a formal administrative system. For example, you might use a tutorial to refresh your abilities with Adobe Flash.

What will my final project for this unit look like?

In this unit you'll create a frame-based tutorial in either CAI or print form. Ordering numbers: Fractions is a sample of a computer assisted instructional tutorial designed and developed by Amy Goldberg as her project for this course.

Amy worked with a content expert, Dr. Janet Bowers, a math professor here at San Diego State University. Janet administers a test for students entering the math major here at SDSU. Many students taking the test were missing items related to ordering fractions, but there was no remediation available to help them learn the correct methods before re-taking the exam. Amy's tutorial is designed to help.

Amy originally created this tutorial for the Web using the Adobe Dreamweaver Coursebuilder extension. The Coursebuilder extension proved a little problematic in more than one browser, however, so I moved it over to Adobe Flash using the Flash Learning Interactions. In the process, I made a few minor revisions in the instruction, but this is 95% Amy's student project.

After you've perused the sample tutorial, check the evaluation rubric for the tutorial project.

Many organizations are using Adobe Flash Learning Interactions, Adobe Captivate, or an authoring system like Udutu to implement computer assisted instruction. If you are interested, you may develop your project using these or another development platform of your choice. Another 671 student, Bob Smith, developed some simple HTML with Javascript that you can modify to create your learning object. More on these choices later.

Some additional examples

Apply

As with so many other skills, one of the best ways to learn how to build individualized instructional tutorials is to build one!

Choose an instructional outcome

The first step is to decide what you want to teach. This might seem a little backward—usually we like to start by finding out what people need to learn. But for your first foray into tutorial-building we'd like to keep the "overhead" low, and let you work with content with which you are already familiar.

So that's the first criteria:

If it is work-related, make sure no one is depending on getting it by a certain deadline, or in a particular format, that may conflict with course schedules and requirements. Better to choose something non-work related. It could be something you're learning from this or another EDTEC course. It might relate to a sport you play, a hobby, or some other interest you have.

That might seem obvious, but it's kind of important. You're going to need to work on this for several weeks, and if you lose interest in the content after just a few days, it'll be harder to stay excited about the work. If in doubt, choose something that has interested you for a long time—there's no reason to think that this project will suddenly kill a life-long interest.

"Useful" means valuable—to someone. Is there an audience who will use and appreciate your tutorial? No fun making something that no one will ever use. Your audience could be other EDTEC students, school teachers or pupils, military or other government personnel, or corporate workers or managers. They might be instructional designers, writers or editors, mathematicians, automobile mechanics, junior lifeguards, amateur equestrians, police officers, dieters, chefs, or biologists.

This next one is trickier, but vital.

If you decide to teach something too simple—remembering a single fact, for instance—your tutorial may be done almost before you've begun. Pick something that involves learning several facts, or several ways to discriminate a concept, or several steps in a procedure, or applying several rules, and so forth.

This leads naturally to the next step, which is to...

Conduct a task analysis

Outline the sub-tasks or sub-ideas involved in your topic.

The sample tutorial for this project illustrates nicely how to build in adequate richness. The sample tutorial is on ordering numbers—fractions in particular. It involves learning four different rules—one with two sub-rules—for ordering fractions:

  1. When the denominators are the same, the larger numerator indicates the larger fraction.
  2. When the numerators are the same, the smaller denominator indicates the larger fraction.
  3. When the numerator is larger AND the denominator is smaller, the fraction is larger.
  4. Round fractions to the closest "benchmark" fraction arranged on a number line.
    1. When two or more fractions have the same benchmark, see whether they are on opposite sides of it.
    2. If two or more fractions are on the same side of the benchmark, use rules 1, 2, and 3 above to compare their distances from the benchmark.

Each of these six rules and sub-rules involves at least one presentation frame and two or three practice frames. The whole lesson, including an introduction and close, consists of about 25 frames. This is on the high end of what you should be aiming for. As a rule of thumb, identify at least three sub-tasks or sub-ideas your learners will need to know and practice in order to accomplish the overall outcome.

This takes some careful thinking, but don't continue until you're comfortable you've got about the right scope for your project. If it's too big, you'll get bogged down in repetitive design and development. If it's too small, you won't have enough to really get a feel for the design and development process.

See the Extend section of this module for more information on conducting task analyses.

Feedback on your task analysis?

One important reason for doing a task analysis at this early stage is to ensure that you have scoped out your project appropriately -- not too small, not too large.

Reflect

Most of us have used individualized instruction at numerous times in our lives. Think of a time in school, at work, or on your own, when you've used individualized instruction to advantage, either as a teacher or a learner.

Post a message to the course listserv (edtec671s1@mailman.sdsu.edu) briefly describing the context and the tutorial or other kind of individualized instruction you used.

Extend

Examples of tutorials

Here are some examples of free tutorials in a wide range of content areas, but all using a similar approach of presenting information and letting users practice and test their understanding. This isn't necessarily a good cross section, since most tutorials are in organization intranets, but it gives you an idea of the range of topics you might tackle.

Where can I refresh my understanding of task analysis?

Well, you did a little of it in EDTEC 540, and even more in EDTEC 544, and possibly some in EDTEC 644 if you've taken that course. Most instructional design textbooks sport one approach or another to task analysis. For this course, I'm fine with any systematic approach you choose. If you have a favorite, or would just like to try an approach you've never used before, please feel free. Here is a partial listing of instructional design texts that include specific methods for conducting task analysis:

Clark, R. (1999). Developing technical training. Silver Spring, MD: International Society for Performance Improvement.

Dick, W. & Carey, L. (1996). The systematic design of instruction. New York: Harper Collins.

Gordon, S. (1994). Systematic training program design. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: PTR Prentice Hall.

Morrison, G., Ross, S., and Kemp, J. (2003). Designing effective instruction. New York: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

Rossett, A. (1987). Training needs assessment. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Educational Technology Publications

Seels, B. & Glasgow, Z. (1998). Making instructional design decisions. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Merrill.

There are many approaches to task analysis, but they are all variations on a theme: How does an expert do this or think about that?

Hierarchical Outline

This works well when you're teaching facts, concepts, and principles. The outline for the Ordering Numbers: Fractions tutorial (in the Apply section of this module) is a good example of a hierarchical list of the rules experts use in ordering fractions.

Cognitive task analysis

If the content is primarily conceptual, you may do what is often called a topic analysis or cognitive task analysis. This can be similar to making a concept map or a hierarchical outline. Here's an example of a concept map:

Be sure to use relational descriptors (the labels on the arrows). One useful method for conducting this type of analysis is to use a series of probe questions that correspond with a constrained set of relational descriptors. Here are some probe questions and corresponding relational descriptors (we'll continue to use the dinosaur example here):

  1. What are dinosaurs a type of? (has type/type of)
  2. What kinds of dinosaurs are there? (has type/type of)
  3. What are the characteristics of carnivores? (has characteristic/characteristic of)
  4. What caused dinosaurs to become extinct? (causes/caused by)

In cognitive task analysis, you're often trying to define facts, concepts, or principles, but you can also use it for procedures.

The EDTEC 544 Web site has a module on cognitive task analysis that you might find helpful.

Procedural analysis

Another way of dealing with a procedure or process of some kind is to to use a procedural analysis.

A procedural analysis results in a linear or branching list of steps:

In situations where you're analyzing more complex heuristics, such as how to conduct a performance analysis, you may use the critical incident method of task analysis. This can also be subsumed in a cognitive task analysis approach.

 

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