Implementing and evaluating your course

IN ADDIE, we call the final stages of course development the Implementation and Evaluation stages. In my model of course development, in the final two stages, I first determine if my expectations have been met, and review all my goals, actions, activities, resources, and expectations.

So how do I do that? First I have to ask myself: what are my expectations for this course? Way back in the beginning, I set the goals of this learning experience. A typical goal in corporate training is to improve performance, so my goal may be to "Increase sales by X% by the second quarter". In academia, the goal may be to "Apply instructional design principles to create pedagogically sound learning materials" (by the end of this course). The elements that each goal have in common? There is an action that must be completed to a specific standard within a specified time frame. 

To determine if my expectations have been met, I review the rubrics I made for each activity. If I find that most of my learners performed poorly, I'll have to determine what went wrong.Were my goals too vague? Too stringent? Did I provide relevant job aids, practice exercises, and other resources? If not, why not?

I can't rely on just my opinion! At the conclusion of every period of instruction, we have to see what the learners thought of the instruction - and the instructors! (Remember, we also solicit this information throughout the course of study) The best way to survey learners and faculty is probably via an anonymous questionnaire. (hint: survey monkey is a great place to host an online survey). When we get the survey results we'll know which elements of the course worked and which didn't...and then we make the modifications and run through the cycle again. Remember, all developments are ongoing. Every time we run a course, we should always be looking at the experiences of our learners and instructors and make changes as required.

Creating learning activities

Last month I wrote about the first 2 elements of my learning model. Today I'm going to revisit the third element: Create, which focuses on creating activities that help learners practice their actions, and Provide, which focuses on providing resources to help learners complete the activity.

Envision the following scenario: the objective is to help the learners develop good presentation skills. It's an online class, so they will use your web conferencing platform to deliver a short presentation on a topic of their choice. They can use the the whiteboard app, application sharing or web tour, whichever they like. They have 5 minutes to present.


My preparation: I've shown the learners a number of online presentations, both good and not so good. We've discussed what makes a good presentation and pitfalls to avoid. I've also begun to prepare a rubric that they can use to help them prepare their presentation -  reproduced below. As part of their preparation, each group will add the remaining criteria to this rubric. When all groups have finished this task, we'll get together for a discussion.

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When the rubric is finished the learners will use it as an aid to help them polish their presentations. When the presentations are finished, the students and the instructor will use the rubric to score and comment upon the presentations. We'll have a number of sessions like this one, finally reaching the point where each learner creates and delivers a 20 minute presentation online.


Next time, we'll talk about the last 2 elements of my model:

Content alone will not be enough to engage your learners. !Ever!

I read an article recently in which the author chronicled his transformation from lecturer to facilitator of peer instruction (Don’t Lecture Me: Rethinking How College Students Learn). I, of course, thought about his comments in regard to e-learning. How often do we see instructional designers create lessons that ask our learners to passively absorb information through reading or listening? Basically, we've taken the f-2-f lecture format and made it even more passive and - shall I say it? - uninspiring - than the lecture from which it was derived!


Many instructional designers begin and end with the content delivered by the SME, which is highly focused on what the learner needs to know by the end of the instructional period. What we really need to do is use that content to decide what the learner needs to DO by the end of the instruction. Not long ago, I created a graphic and posted it here in the blog. The graphic, part of which is repeated below, tells us to first, define the goal of this learning, then identify the actions learners can take to reach the goal.

It's not enough to focus our efforts on getting the content complete and correct. We have to create opportunities for the learners to apply the information contained within the course to solve something - whether it be how to solve a math problem or how to conduct an interview.


I work for a college, so I'm all about applied learning. Come to think of it, I'd be about applied learning if I worked for a university! I believe that focusing on content leaves a very large gap between the passive transfer of information in an educational environment and learners' performances in the real world, doing real world tasks.


My final word (for now): 


Content alone will not be enough to engage your learners. !Ever! 


More on this next post.

Designing learning for today's learners

A few days ago, I found an image that depicted the many ways educators can use ICT to engage and challenge their learners. I decided to create a similar graphic, but I used images of people interacting with various technologies instead of the spheres in the original. This is the image I created:

Are you keeping up? If you're teaching face-to-face, do you show YouTube videos in class? Do you ask your learners to collaboratively solve a problem using a smart-board? Do you exchange texts or bring in guest speakers via video conferencing? Elicit comments through clickers or smartphones?  If you're not doing all or most of the above, you should be. In but a few more years, what we now consider blended learning (classroom based + ICT) will become the standard. Today's learners want to be educated using the tools they use every day. Learners have become consumers of educational goods - if we don't supply them with the tools and experiences they're looking for - they'll simply take their business elsewhere.

If you teach online, are you using the technologies available to you? Do you use web conferencing in a collaborative way, or are you replicating the sage on the stage electronically? In one of our portfolio classes, we ask the students to create an electronic portfolio, then present it to their classmates and the instructor live through our web conferencing platform. If you're on a smaller budget, you can accomplish the same thing with Skype. Social media sites are a great place to post lesson plans and assignments. Twitter is a great way to keep in touch. No longer should interactions in an online class be relegated to the (asynchronous) discussion forum or course email. Use the technologies available to you to reach out and interact with your learners - in a way that they're accustomed to.

(Or you'll lose them)

ADDIE Interactive!

I only had a few spare minutes, so I decided to create a quick and dirty demo of an interactive application to match 7 definitions to the phases of ADDIE to which they belong.The following is a Screenr presentation that shows a user (me) interacting with the app. Sorry, no audio! The app is built with Dreamweaver's Coursebuilder.

Focusing on activities

Why do so many online courses focus on content? If your learners have a text book, why do so many instructional designers feel they have to replicate the text in the online course? What does this accomplish?

Well, I’ve been pondering those questions for years – and asking my colleagues to focus on creating activities to support the learning objectives rather than paraphrase the text. It’s more difficult, it takes longer…and it can lead to an excellent learning experience…

So how do we create activities not content? Some instructional designers argue that because they are not content experts, they can’t be expected to be able to determine what the learners need to know at the end of a lesson. Well, I do a lot of developing sans content expert, and here’s what I’ve discovered: if I have a good learning objective, I can design activities to support that objective. If the objective is a simple “Describe…. “ (I hate those) I can have the learners search out descriptions on the web,  in their text, or through conversations with others. Better yet, I can give them the descriptions and ask them to match them to terms using a simple interactive application. Ever play My Word Coach for the DS or Wii? One of the quizzes in that program does just that – except you’re racing against the clock. As you proceed through the levels, the terms and definitions keep coming back to you in various games, and at the end of each level you’re almost certain to have a far better understanding of the term than you did at the start of the instruction.

Instead of providing content, I provided an interactive activity that my learners would enjoy – and that would help them learn and understand the terms they need to be able to go on to the next activity. Next post, I’m going to tell you how and why I designed that activity. 

HOTS (Or Bloom, Part II)

In my previous post, I told you about designing  learning activities for a group of students learning group counselling skills. The plan was to have them collect (and remember) information, understand it, and apply it (by leading the group). Sometimes, we need to move the learners past apply and on to analyzing, evaluating, and creating new meanings. In the case of our soon-to-be counsellors, we've already begun to push them toward the acquisition of higher order thinking skills.


After our learners took turns leading the group, we had them discuss their experiences. This gave them a chance to analyze their behavior as group leader - and to receive advice and opinions from their peers. We asked them to evaluate both their own performance and the performance of the others in the team.


Create is the highest level in the modified taxonomy. What we're eventually going to do with our counselling students is have them put together everything they've learned in this module to create their own facilitation plan for a group meeting with their clients.