Assignment: LASA 2-Action Research: Emerging Technology Mediated Lesson Plan Design
Your institution is moving to an online, hybrid, and emerging web-based initiatives course delivery to compete with other institutions and programs on a national or even global level. The dean not only wants you to develop online, hybrid, and emerging web-based initiatives degree programs and courses but also wants you to set your institution's program apart from everyone else's. You are charged with developing novel course activities, assignments, and assessments that will make your program cutting edge and unique. The ultimate goal is to attract a new audience of students, enhance student learning, and increase student persistence or retention.
Of course, until the ultimate goal is reached, the resources (money) are limited. As we have learned in the class, there are new technological tools being developed on a daily basis to which access is free. In addition, you have learned the theory of learning to use technology by using technology.
The final project will be a report on the research process. The purpose of this assignment is to learn how to use technology in designing, conducting, and evaluating research.
Below are the components for this assignment:
• The Rapid Prototype
o Rapid prototyping began in the 1980s as a computer-aided design process for creating plastic models or molds of physical objects. Today, rapid prototyping theory is used in much wider applications, including course design.
In our case, rapid prototyping is the design of a small-scale learning object in order to test and revise for large-scale use in future applications. The purpose of rapid prototyping is to build and test on a small scale to help save money and time.
• The Learning Object
o Learning objects, as discussed in the literature, have many definitions. For our purpose here, we will define the learning object as a digital or web-based resource used in the learning process. For instance, the online, hybrid, and emerging web-based initiatives course is a learning object. It contains many components, such as descriptive data and instructional content, in the form of text, graphics, and other media. It also contains metadata that may relate to other learning objects, such as prerequisites for other courses, authorship, copyright, etc.
The learning object will be a lesson plan for your course syllabus.
The process for the development of your learning object is as follows:
Assessing the Needs
- Assess the outline of your course activities.
- Select an activity that you would like to develop for your course using any technology that we have discussed in the course or that you have researched on your own. This may be a chat room, blog, wiki, video conference, etc.
Setting the Objectives
- What should your audience learn from the lesson plan?
- How does it relate to the course and program outcomes?
- How will this lesson plan help students in their career or in real-life situations?
Designing or Constructing the Prototype
- Create detailed instructions for the participants.
- Determine how students will interact with the instructor and with one another.
- Create an assessment tool to determine what the students have learned.
Implementation
- In Module 5, you would have presented the prototype lesson plan to the class. Your classmates will participate in the lesson plan and provide feedback.
Evaluation
- Use your assessment results to analyze what students have learned.
- Use feedback from classmates to decide how to refine the lesson plan for further testing and implementation.
• The Report
The report is presented as a 6- to 7-page formal paper that uses professional writing and APA conventions. The report is divided into the following sections:
o Introduction and overview of the project.
o Description of the lesson plan, its purpose, and its relationship to the learning objectives and course outcomes.
o Description of the audience involved in the prototype process, as follows:
- Explain the rationale for the technology used in the delivery of the lesson plan.
- Elicit the critical objectives of the lesson plan.
- Determine the extent to which the participants reached the objectives.
- Ascertain where and how the objectives were achieved.
o Analysis of the information gathered from the assessments and participants' feedback.
o Logical conclusions drawn from the analysis are as follows:
- In what ways was the lesson plan effective?
- In what ways can the lesson plan be improved?
o Revisions that will be made to the lesson plan for future implementation and testing.
Finally, provide a strong argument with supporting evidence for how emerging technology can enhance the costs, ethical implications, and legal ramifications against the potential for increased enrollment, effectiveness, and engagement in higher education.