Category Archives: Uncategorized

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Reinstating IDDblog: Let What I learned During the Pandemic Inform What I Do After It

This post marks the return of the Instructional Design and Development Blog, known as the IDDblog, after a 29-month hibernation. If you’ve been our blog reader, you may still remember one of our last scheduled posts in March 2020, titled “Videoconferencing Alternatives: How Low-Bandwidth Teaching Will Save Us All.” That very timely post guided administrators and instructors on the selection of remote teaching methodologies when the coronavirus forced schools to move courses online in a matter of days. After that, IDDblog remained mostly static because staff members of DePaul’s Center for Teaching and Learning had to give up blog-writing to respond to the intense needs for faculty and student support as almost all of DePaul’s course offerings switched to remote.

I’ve heard a saying that to say Covid changed our lives is an understatement, and I couldn’t agree more. This global pandemic has brought something bigger than our common understanding of change. It threw us into what Yuval Noal Harari called “a large-scale social experiment” – an experiment that no government, business, and educational board would agree to conduct in normal times. In his article, “The World After Coronavirus,” Harari called for reflections at the global level, but I think it is the change that took place at the individual level that seems to be even more striking and unretractable. From the perspective of teaching and learning, the privilege we’ve lost for in-person instruction, the opportunities we’ve gained to access courses through a few clicks, and the habits we might have formed during this lost-and-found period are all worth reflecting on. As a guinea pig of one, I thought this blog could be a place for me to conduct my own reflection, like Michel de Montaigne did as he drew meanings and reasonings by looking no further than the life of his own.

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Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion in Foundational STEM courses Curated Resources and Action Items

Students watching webinar on computer, studying online.

Authors

Kyle Grice and Margaret Bell

Our faculty learning community (FLC) generated some big ideas to make STEM classrooms more equitable. Below are some big ideas to make STEM classrooms more equitable; we give a brief orientation to the concepts, with links to additional resources, and potential next steps. Of course, this is only a selection of the extensive body of work, and there is more to be done. While there are a lot of ideas within this list, the most important thing is to simply begin. Within some of these ideas are comments from your colleagues at DePaul about their experiences with implementing the ideas. While our FLC focused on STEM, these concepts could be applied to any course at DePaul. Full names of all the participants in the FLC and their contact information are at the end of the document.  

I. Spend some time in social learning and personal reflection

Big ideas: 

Meaningful and sustained change in education and academia can only come from acknowledging several key concepts: 1) Our society was built in a way that disproportionately privileges White / Male / Cis / Hetero / Able-bodied / Young / Neurotypical / Christian / High Socio-economic-status people in education, housing, employment, and health and well-being, at the implicit exclusion or explicit oppression of ‘others’. Therefore, equity, not just equality, is our responsibility in academia. 2) We all have implicit in-group biases developed from existing in our current society and, as instructors, are coming from places of power and privilege. 3) Everyone has equal and infinite potential to learn and grow, and emphasizing a growth mindset in interacting with students can be impactful. Continue reading →

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Considering New Options for Responding to Student Writing

In her recent Computers and Composition article on teaching writing using Learning Management Systems (LMSs), Allison Hutchison unpacked the “wicked problem” faculty face when using an institutionally-required system. Hutchison’s literature review outlines how faculty in the field of rhetoric and composition have critiqued the technologies that mediate writing instruction; indeed, this type of scholarship has become increasingly prevalent, as digital platforms for composing seem to be ever increasing (and thus ever more frequently appearing in our classrooms).

I’ve attempted to apply Hutchison’s framework for identifying the problem, the needs, and the potential solutions (albeit in a much simpler format) to a particular strand of practice in the writing classroom: providing feedback on assignments. DePaul recently adopted two technologies that can be used for this purpose, and both contain affordances and limitations that instructors should consider when adopting. The descriptions below are perhaps more utilitarian and less of a critique, but given that this is a blog post, and not an academic article, that framing seemed more…well, useful.  Continue reading →

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Best Practices for Video Use in Instructional Design

“We can just record my existing PowerPoint slides.”

The phrase always sends shivers down my spine.  Not because recording PowerPoint slides isn’t effective, as in some situations it can still be useful, but because of the seemingly flippant attitude of the “just” part.  If only it were that easy, and a recorded PowerPoint was the end-all solution for online learning.

This is always where we start our conversation that, in essence, defines my ethics of video lectures in instructional design.  This is a very loose framework, and not necessarily based on any particular theory I’ve encountered, but rather through observations of multitudes of online courses using various approaches to content delivery and seeing what works based on the course and the context.  Simply deploying a “video” isn’t really that simple.

Recently, I heard a phrase that I think sums this up nicely: “You haven’t yet mastered a tool until you understand when not to use it.” Continue reading →

Where Do You See Yourself in 5 Years? A Look at Strategic Planning and Your Stakeholder Goals

As part of faculty and learning support staff in higher education, the phrase strategic plan is a term central to projects to pursue, resources to allocate, and roles to identify for the university or institution. Where do you fit in the grand scheme of your institution’s agenda and vision? Does your work as an educator matter in the midst of corporate, large-scale goals? How can you support a strategic plan? If you’re a student, you may wonder how a strategic plan is supposed to benefit you in the midst of an often corporate-feeling objective. 

Since I am employed at a university with a newly minted strategic plan, and I also study at a school with a new strategic plan in progress, to ignore the significance placed on institutional priorities is unavoidable. My day-to-day work as an instructional technology consultant is framed in terms of Grounded in the Mission 2024. The support programming and resources available to me as a student are under town hall debates with the university president. If successful in its implementation and process, a strategic plan should be apparent to all stakeholders, albeit in different ways. Continue reading →

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Becoming an a11y: Inclusive Design in the Classroom

For years, the staff in my office have been talking about and writing about a platform of accessibility and concepts of Universal Design. Erin largely talked about a movement within accessibility called the Universal Design for Learning (UDL) framework. UDL focuses designing and ensuring that spaces —physical or digital— can be used by virtually anyone. Joe, built upon this idea by explaining the three pronged approach that UDL uses:

  1. Provide multiple means of engagement
  2. Provide multiple means of representation
  3. Provide multiple means of action and expression

Dee introduced some basic ways that we can implement these principles directly into our courses. However, while I was at D2L’s annual conference a couple weeks ago, I realized that we’ve done a pretty good job explaining what accessibility is, but we’ve never interrogated why it matters. Continue reading →

It’s Time to Talk About Deadlines

In September of 2018 I decided to take a leap of faith and go back to school to get an MFA in Game Design. I don’t have a background in games, my undergraduate degree is in music performance, but I’ve always loved games and when I found DePaul’s MFA in Game Design program I knew this was the path I needed to take.

This may sound ridiculous, but when I enrolled in graduate school I did not expect to be challenged by (and greatly struggle with) deadlines. Without giving the wrong impression about my overall self-confidence, deadlines have never really been a problem for me. Most of my career before going back to school was as a corporate copywriter: deadline city. If I was used to meeting tight deadlines literally every single day then surely I’d be able to handle following a syllabus and staying on top of things in school.

These are just a few of the thoughts that mocked and bludgeoned my consciousness as I fell into panic, disbelief, and about 60oz of cold brew while frantically pulling my first all-nighter to finish a project for school.

What happened? 

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Augmented Reality, Korean Dramas, and Higher Education

You probably asking yourself what do augmented reality (AR)and Korean dramas have to do with each other? Well, in December 2018 Korea debuted a new drama on Netflix, Memories of Alhambra, which revolved around a groundbreaking AR game based on medieval battles in Alhambra. The main character of the drama, Yoo Jin Woo, is a CEO of an investment company that specializes in optical devices. One optical device he creates was a contact lens that allows users to interact with AR content. For Jin Woo, getting his hands on the next big AR game was imperative. This leads to a late night phone call from an AR game creator, Jung Se Joo, telling him they need to meet ASAP otherwise he might sell his game to Jin Woo’s competitor. This gets Jin Woo on plane to Granada, Spain, and thus begins his AR journey.

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Video Lecture Production Tip: Extracting Videos from PowerPoint

I frequently work with faculty who want to create a video lecture for an online course using the PowerPoint decks they present in the classroom.

I have misgivings about PowerPoint as a classroom presentation tool to start with (not the least of which is the problem of cognitive load [Mayer1]), but that’s a topic for another discussion. Faculty like them, and an instructional designer (like yours truly) learns to pick their battles.

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Student-Centered Vs. Teacher-Centered Classrooms: Which and Why?

We have all seen the stereotypical version of what a lecture-based classroom looks like in television and movies. Whenever popular media wants to portray school as being dull, we are shown an unfashionable teacher standing at the front of a class speaking in a monotone voice about a dry topic. This (hopefully minus the dull, monotone, and dry parts) is what’s referred to as a teacher-centered classroom. In contrast, there are student-centered classrooms that encourage learning to be directed by the students. Assignments in this format typically involve small group collaboration and/or autonomy for the learner to choose how and what to learn. The student-centered arrangement has quickly been gaining popularity and is considered by many to be a more dynamic method of learning. However, both structures have their advantages, and I will discuss how each can be implemented in order to create an effective learning environment for all.

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