As Lance Armstrong wrote,
It's Not About the Bike
It's Not About Projectors
or PowerPoint Either.
It's About Principles of Psychology
Applied to Learning Processes.
What We'll Do
For 8 weeks, we'll study practitioner-oriented principles (POPs)--the kind of principles that you can put to work to solve real design problems in education and training. We'll learn how to critique and formulate principles, how they're grounded in theory and practice, and how to translate them into design decision and actions.
Then we'll take the remaining six weeks of the semester to work with a team of campus educational technology professionals to formulate and illustrate design principles that professors can apply to teaching and learning with PowerPoint. Finally, we'll translate these principles series of 24 independent study modules for faculty at SDSU.
What Will be Different About this Kind
of PowerPoint Training?
Almost all existing PowerPoint training focuses on the mechanics of creating presentations. Our approach will be to focus first on how to use PowerPoint to optimize student learning. Each module will emphasize a different set of design principles, addressing issues such as:
- guiding attention and managing cognitive load
- stimulating and examining student predictions and explanations
- managing classroom discussions and exercises
- modeling study skills and metacognition
- organizing multimedia environments for self-study
These modules will be dynamic, self-paced learning opportunities built on PowerPoint itself, with links to supplementary movie-like "learnlets" showing professors how to implement the principles, and how to employ relevant PowerPoint tools and functions. We'll also develop job-aids and templates.
But we will stay close to the underlying premise that has guided EDTEC 640 students for almost two decades: knowledge is power; but knowledge based on principles is reliable and replicable power.
What You'll Learn
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Recognize introductory concepts and principles of human psychology, particularly cognitive psychology, and apply these appropriately when discussing and writing about technology-based learning.
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Prepare informed written and oral critiques of practitioner-oriented principles and guidelines related to the design of educational products and technology-based learning environments.
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Explicate selected theories and models of human cognition and summarize the evidence that supports these theories and models.
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Discern and propose relationships between these theories-models and proposed practitioner-oriented principles.
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Propose and justify evidence-based and theory-based principles and/or guidelines that will inform the work of designers and developers of educational products and technology-based learning environments.
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Use provided multimedia shells, templates, and design guidelines to design, implement, and test one or more modules to assist instructors in applying sound principles of instructional psychology to multimedia-facilitated learning activities.
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Work as a member of a design and development enterprise, including professional designers and producers to specify tools and media components that will augment the learning modules.
What's Already Been Done
Working with a team of professional educational technologists from SDSU's Instructional Technology Services and the SDSU Qualcomm Institute for Innovation and Educational Success, the Center for Teaching and Learning has staged a series of meeting with professors who use PowerPoint to teach large undergraduate courses. In a series of focus group sessions, the team has explored faculty...
- perceptions of PowerPoint capabilities
- understanding of instructional psychology and design
- skill and strategies for using PowerPoint tools and functions
- reactions to preliminary design concepts for the modules
Senior EDTEC students Clair Roush and Paul McManus, working with Dr. Marcie Bober, have prepared reports on these focus groups to guide our work.
Focus group reactions to the preliminary design concepts have generally been positive. We plan to shape the concepts into shells and style guides to support more specific design and production. Shells will include pre-programmed elements for built in helps, links to examples and practice and similar components that will minimize time and skills to produce the modules.