You really like the idea of making a learning object for your favorite course and you’re about ready to dive-in, but crap, you can’t quite figure out what to base it on. Sure you could easily pick a subject willy-nilly but you don’t want to go through the trouble of designing an object to discover, after development is completed, that it was all for nothing; the object’s subject no longer really hits on the focus of the course and, as a result, nobody ends up using the thing in the end.
If you are going to make a learning object, you want to feel confident that the one you make is going to prove beneficial to both you and your students. So what’s the problem? After all, you’re savvy. You’re hip to the general notion of LOs and their benefits. You got down the learner-centric model of teaching and know all about the benefits of teaching to multiple styles of learning. Heck, you even know what chunking is. You get it. So why are you banging your head up against the wall?
Picking the appropriate course material to design an LO around can be a bit overwhelming at first, especially if you’ve already decided what kind you’re going to make. Put away those fanciful dreams of creating a super cool interactive timeline or ultra fun game for the time being. Let’s get focused on content selection for starters.
Determine Instructional Goals (Learning Objective = Learning Object)
In determining the content material for your LO, it’s a good idea to first figure out your instructional goals and determine the key needs of the learners, your students. This information will greatly help you narrow in on the subject matter and determine what kind of object to make.
Ask yourself a few key questions to help determine what would be the most beneficial material for your object. First, what is it that you want your students to know/be able to do as a result of the course? Second, what ideas/concepts are the most difficult for the majority of your students?
In order to fully answer these questions you will want to think about the big picture. Make a list of all the instructional goals for the course. Further break these goals down into discrete learning objectives.
After spending some time creating your list, think about which of these objectives seems to be the most difficult for the students to comprehend. You guessed it, turning the most difficult learning objective into the focus of the learning object will greatly benefit both you and your students.
So, from examining the big picture of the course, you have focused on a single learning objective to be – drum roll please — your chunk, the subject of your learning object.
Examine for Solidifiability
Not so fast! We need to finesse things a bit. For starters, as a general rule it is a good idea to select content for your learning object that is unlikely to change drastically over the next several years. This will make the object significantly more cost-efficient, as then there will be no need to redesign the object later on down the line. Otherwise you risk your object/content becoming obsolete before you know it!
How does your chunk hold up? If it’s crumbling, no worries. Reexamine your list and see how you can revise your chunk so it’s solid or pick another learning objective from the difficulty list or keep it as is and accept that it will need regular maintenance.
Moving on. From here we need to determine the kind of learning content you will need to move students from where they are now to the end result of meeting the learning objective. Let’s examine the needs of the learner for some direction here.
Determine Learner’s needs
Learners need their interest piqued to be motivated to learn. Chances are you have not yet piqued the interest and motivated the learner in regards to the content chunk, your selected learning objective. Part of the problem can be that you are not reaching the students’ various styles of learning. As learning styles are not the same for everyone, it is important to provide multiple paths through the course and its content. If your current lesson plan is only appealing to the auditory learner or the verbal learner, for example, you will want to make sure the learning object includes elements that speak largely to the visual, tactile, and/or collaborative learners.
Examine the current course materials you already provide to your students to help them meet the selected learning objective. Which learning styles are you currently catering too? Which learning styles are you leaving out? Are you currently utilizing any learning activities (games, quizzes, videos, etc) to try and reach this goal? If so, what was the result from using them in the past? If students are struggling with the subject, there are some shortcomings. Have you already pinpointed what they are?
Try to determine where your current shortcomings are in helping students achieve the learning objective. If you are having trouble, examine some of the other course learning objectives where students seem to be excelling. Are you utilizing any different strategies there? How about learning activities? What seems to make these strategies/activities successful where the ones supporting your chunk/the selected learning objective have fallen short?
If your current in-classroom lesson hits on one or two learning styles but leaves three or four out, you most likely will want to make sure your learning object utilizes features that speak to excluded learning styles. What does that tell you about the type of object you will create? Does the use of video seem more beneficial to your students’ needs than an online quiz? Would your students benefit more from that interactive timeline you dreamed about or would a game they could play in small groups prove more beneficial?
The idea here is not to decide necessarily on the type of object you will make but to get you thinking about the learning styles you will need to focus the strongest on and how that affects your content. Does it seem like your chunk would have to morph into a massive boulder in order to pull it off? Maybe some further narrowing in on your selected learning objective is needed. Hard to tell, you say. Well let’s focus on how to ressize a chunk.
Resizing the Chunk
Another need of the learner to consider is time management. You must accommodate the busy schedule of the learner if you want your students to actually utilize the tool you are designing. If your chunk/selected learning objective requires a great deal of content, so much so that the resulting object would take more than 15 minutes to complete, then your object is going to be too large to be effective.
You should consider whether or not you have too large of a scope. You might need to reexamine your selected learning objective to see if it can be narrowed down even further into a smaller chunk. And don’t forget the challenge of memory when trying to acquire new information. Will your chunk of content require the learner to hold more than a few things in memory at one time in order to comprehend it? If so, then you need to further refine your chunk.
If you find your subject cannot be further narrowed, then you will need to divide the content into smaller lessons, or subunits, where each subunit is a learning object and, compiled together, they complete the lesson of the selected learning objective. If you are unsure whether or not your subunits are small enough, keep in mind that each subunit should have a completion time under 15 minutes.
Quality Chunk
When resizing your chunk, remember that the narrowing process shouldn’t be about editing out context; you need to provide contextual info to support effective learning. As an educator, you want the learning object to encourage critical thinking. That said you will need to keep in mind when gathering up your content that a limit in size should not limit the quality of information.
The goal of resizing is to break the lesson up into 15 minute chunks or smaller, that are brief and well focused so the LO can be most effective. But if you edit out vital content to reach this goal, then you are defeating the purpose by lowering its quality and ultimately its effectiveness.
While in the process of resizing your chunk, ask yourself if you have edited out valuable content that’s necessary in reaching your overall goals as an educator. The content of your chunk needs to remain sophisticated; you need to use the information and references to skillfully compose the LO so that you both maintain the quality and size efficiency. This way you will optimize the object’s overall effectiveness to foster a competent expression of ideas and appreciate and work with diverse points of view.
The good news is that visuals (including the way material is displayed), can help with comprehension by supplying supporting clues and eliminating needless distractions to help lessen the cognitive demands on the brain during instruction. Keep this in mind when editing content.
Wrapping Up
So far we’ve discussed how to determine the most beneficial content for a learning object, the appropriate size of a chunk, and quality maintenance of its content. For simplicity, this discussion has been centered around the notion that you will be designing your LO for a single course. But chances are you are currently instructing three or four classes a week. With reusability being a key principle behind LOs then it would follow that in choosing the most beneficial content for an LO you would need to consider learning objectives that cross over more than one of the courses you are teaching and to arrive at your chunk that way. By doing this, you are sure to get greater use out of your object. Regardless though, the overall process is the same.
That’s it. You are officially a Chunk King. Now your next steps in designing a learning object is to determine how to best structure, divide, and present the material in the most effective manner. That is a lesson for another day.
