We had a lot of fun in the learning design session. It was our very first face to face session. It was nice to meet everyone in person, and I felt that there was a lot of positive energy.

I met Joanne, my peer observation partner for the first time. As an aside, I did find it very useful to be paired up for the observations. I was a bit concerned how this would work out. However, now I feel very glad to have a partner that I feel I can learn a lot from.

Our activity

In that session we worked together with Asuf. Joanne brought in a physical artifact – a big red arcade button that was linked to neo-matrix light display. Press the button and the system randomly generates a Pokémon character in neo-matrix lights. It was created to demonstrate one of the potential outcomes for a student if they followed the tutorial located in the LCC Creative Technology Lab website. The artifact itself was very engaging, so I quickly discarded my written lesson plan, in favour of working with Joanne and Asuf.

We were asked to consider how the artifact could be amended. Together we came up with a few possible changes that could be added to the next iteration:

• We wanted to make sure the information on the tutorial was easy to access whilst playing with the artifact. So, we added a QR code for the website tutorial.
• We wanted to add an audio feature that could introduce key concepts and improve its accessibility.
• Finally, we would like to make it easier to see the mechanism inside. So, we redesigned the box to have a clear side.

The learning outcomes for the artifact itself are:

1. To experience the application of an input button to trigger output in the form of neo-matrix lights.
2. To experience the concept of random generation as applied through the programming of neo-matrix lights.

For me the value in the artifact lies in that it is modelling the concepts that the tutorial seeks to teach. It provides a worked example to the students that visit the Creative Technology Labs in a fun and engaging way. According to Sweller et al:

Providing students with a worked example can be particularly beneficial to students that are new to the concept, as it will help to scaffold their learning.

Reflecting on my practice

This got me thinking about how it relates to my practice. In Autumn term of this year, I co-developed an introductory session on H5P. H5P is a tool for creating interactive content on Moodle. You can build presentations with embedded questions, add clickable objects to images and videos – and much more. We decided that it would be beneficial for us to create some example H5P activities to show how they could be used and what was possible. The examples modelled specifically their use in a flipped classroom, and were presented to the learners in a pre-session activity.

Sweller et al (2019) outlines some important constraints that would be useful to consider when designing worked examples. They tell us that it is important to consider split attention affect, redundancy affect and multimodal affect. So, taking this in to account I tried to reflect on how we could have improved the implementation of these examples:

Split attention affect: I think we could have paid more attention to how we presented the examples. Learners received all our examples in a pre-session activity. This was followed with a live demonstration on how to create a basic H5P activity in a synchronous training session. Perhaps, we could have reserved the examples for the live session. This would help to make sure that both chunks of information were received at the same time.

Redundancy affect: We modelled 5 example activities. Possibly we should have reduced this to two.

Multimodal affect: If we allowed more time for the viewing of the examples in the lesson. We could have discussed each example activity at the time of viewing.

Finally, I think it could have also worked if we designed the whole session as an asynchronous resource. Including written and video instructions to replace the live demonstration, and audio files to describe the activities.

References

Atkinson, Robert K., Sharon J. Derry, Alexander Renkl, and Donald Wortham. “Learning from Examples: Instructional Principles from the Worked Examples Research.” Review of Educational Research 70, no. 2 (June 2000): 181–214. https://doi.org/10.3102/00346543070002181.

Sweller, John, Jeroen J. G. van Merriënboer, and Fred Paas. “Cognitive Architecture and Instructional Design: 20 Years Later.” Educational Psychology Review 31, no. 2 (June 2019): 261–92. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10648-019-09465-5.