MSIDT 545: Emerging Technologies and Issues in Teaching

Hello!

The other course in my fourth semester of my CSUF MSIDT program (Fall 2015) was MSIDT 545, Emerging Technologies and Issues in Teaching. According to the university website, this course “Focuses on the theoretical basis, issues, and strategies for improving teaching and learning through the use of emerging technologies.” To support this, the course instructional objectives are:

- The ability to develop a curriculum-based instructional project that incorporates one (or more) emerging technology.

- Describing and evaluating ways in which emerging technologies are likely to change the teaching and learning process.

- Locating, analyzing, and synthesizing resources that identify and describe the development and use of emerging technologies in teaching and learning.

These are not exactly the same objectives that were outlined in the course syllabus, but they are pretty close. According to the syllabus the instructional objectives were to:

- Examine and explicate the theoretical basis and issues regarding a variety of emerging technologies

- Assess a learning activity that incorporates one (or more) emerging technologies;

- Evaluate and compare a variety of emerging technologies as they relate to theories of learning and curriculum development;

- Create, investigate, analyze, and discuss ways in which emerging technologies are likely to change the teaching and learning process; and

- Locate, analyze, compare, and select resources that use emerging technologies for effective teaching and learning.

This is a lot of stuff, but this course was able to address all of these objectives in one form or another. Many of the activities for this course were designed to introduce the learners to various social media formats that could be used for instructional purposes. These included:

Discussion threads. This is a common instructional method that was used for every class in the first four semesters of the IDT program, so the learners were already familiar with posting and responding to these threads.

Voicethread. This technology is interactive, and required learners to use microphones to record responses through the Voicethread website. This was used for discussion on copyrights, fair use, and the Teach Act.

Podcasts. Many of the learners were already familiar with podcasts, but few of them had actually recorded a podcast before (I had never listened to one before, to be honest). We used the Podomatic website for this, and I really enjoyed this activity, and am considering supplementing my blogs with this technology.

Wiki Entries. The learners were expected to produce a website for this course using Dreamweaver, and the instructor set up a wiki so that each student could contribute tips on using this program. This seemed like a clunky way to present learning, but if the whole course was based around the wiki it would probably seem a lot more relevant.

Blog. Each student was expected to start their own blog and make a few entries related to instructional design. This was kind of a slam-dunk for me as I had already started this blog, which was pretty fortuitous.

Live Chats. The instructor set up two live chats for the learners, and these were some of the very few examples of synchronous learning that took place during the entire program. These were technically challenging for some of the students, as there were cases where some learners were not able to figure out how to log in or make their microphones work. These were learning moments, to be sure.

Twitter. Each learner was expected to have a Twitter account and Tweet relevant ID links using the hash tag for the cohort. Not all students were familiar with the technology, but this was a great opportunity for some students to embrace this social media.

Facebook. Students were also expected to maintain a Facebook account, and some of the students were reluctant to participate due to privacy issues. This was a great reminder that there is a fairly large portion of society that does not use or trust Facebook, so it might not be the greatest instructional tool.

Supplementing this was the aforementioned Dreamweaver website project, which was quite involved for me. I had difficulty translating the text to the real world when I put together my website. Lynda.com tutorials were a godsend for this course, and I was able to make a pretty respectable site on analyzing performance problems. The biggest thing to keep in mind when working on the site is to follow the rubric and make sure everything is included. Seriously.

For this course, the learners were assigned two main texts (reviews of these will be provided soon):

- Palloff, R., & Pratt, K. (2013). Lessons from the virtual classroom: The realities of online teaching. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.

- McFarland, D., & Grover, C. (2014). Dreamweaver CC: the missing manual. Sebastopol, CA: O'Reilly Media.

IDT 545 was a valuable course, particularly for learners who were not already savvy with the use of social media. One does not have to use social media on a personal basis to be an effective instructional designer, but it is important to know how it works and to acknowledge its importance to many learners. Also, I was a bit skeptical about the Dreamweaver website assignment, but when it was all done I felt that I had a lot better understanding of how websites are constructed. It was definitely time that was well spent.

Thanks for checking out my IDT blog, and next we will take a look at the texts we used for the IDT 545 course.