Effective Instructional Design

My MS in Online Teaching and learning from California State University has made me believe that effective instructional design depends on sensitivity to the cognitive load which, depends on an understanding of how the human mind works.  There are many things about the presentation of the instructional design that I was not aware of. As I began reading Clark and Moreno & Mayer’s article I came to know how pictorial and verbal material is associated with cognitive structures.

I think that a presentation should be broken down into digestible ‘sub-sets’ alternating between a few seconds of narration followed by a few seconds of corresponding animation. Moreno & Mayer found in their experiment (2002)  that people with high-spatial ability have to put less effort in holding and manipulating mental images whereas low-spatial learners may not be benefited of simultaneous presentation. This may require them to devote more time in cognitive processing to hold mental images.

Moreover, segmenting helps in making meaningful subsets of the instructional material. I find when any video/power point is presented with animation continuously, with no breaks between the segments; I can make sense from the first segment. But, the additional processes of organizing and integration of information presented in next segments become difficult to understand because my mind is still processing the information presented in the previous segment. Thus, a useful practice is to use the technique that can be called weeding. Weeding reduces load and make the multimedia narration as concise and coherent as possible.

GameMaker

This week has been very interesting. Clark brings some important points regarding the culture of transfer in the workplace. She emphasis that the training should be such that at the end participants are in a position to apply knowledge and skills learnt in real life situations. Chapter 13 further suggests selecting the instructional methods to promote deeper learning (p.342). There may be several reasons behind failure of training and the main reason can be ‘poor learning strategies and monitoring failure.’

I tried to make a game using Gamemaker.com which is free platform to develop free games. It enables users to create basic games from scratch or user can write codes to create one. I started with a game but found that it is a long process and I need to practice before I could create a good game. I tried using Classtoolnet.com to create a basic game and realised the dustbin game was the best fit for my topic. Classtoolnet offers limited options and there are few colors to choose from. But it is a very good free tool which gives teachers and students an option to create their own games, even if, they don’t know coding. Teachers do not have to rely on expensive games or game making software. They can make their own small games using this tool. The only drawback is the color scheme which may not be fit for visually challenged students.