CECS 6020, Week 2

When I started teaching high school engineering four years ago, I had no idea how to teach. I had no formal training or even an introduction. I was 'thrown to the lions', my fate was 'ink or swim'. Luckily, I swam. I had no idea what to do other than try to convey what I knew about the subject in the most effective and concise way possible. AND make it fun in the process. I began my masters in edtech the start of my 3rd year of teaching. By then I had proven to be a somewhat successful teacher, by evidence of the growth of my program. My masters degree was my first exposure to the field of professional education. Sure I had been practicing it for two years, but I didn't know the theory and science behind learning. It has been slightly comical and reassuring that every new theory I learn about is exactly what I had been doing all along. So, until my graduate education my experience with instructional design was minimal. I conveyed what I knew the only way I knew to do it. I took an instructional design course the last semester of my masters degree. The course was based on the Dick & Carey model. The course project was to create a design for a three hour block of instruction. Concurrently I was creating a graduate level course on mobile learning, so I combined the two.

So far, in this class, I have come to understand that there are different levels of instructional design. For example, basic ID is prescriptive and provides a step by step framework for design. However, advanced instructional design uses one or several learning theories to design instruction, and has deeper roots in understanding knowledge (epistemology) and instruction (pedagogy).

For this class, I will research and present on Situated Learning. I chose this model because I had no idea what it was. I wanted a challenge.