Dr. Chris Show

The first step of developing an assessment plan, and the first step of instructional design, in general, is getting a firm grasp of the actual instructional goal.  If you're lucky you will have the opportunity to do a full needs analysis with resources and access to the learners, chances are you will need to be a bit more scrappy and try and muddle through to dig deeper.  But it is a critical step.  I tend to try and keep asking, sort of a "Five Why's" approach when I'm in a pickle with someone who isn't clear or doesn't want to share.  I'm also not easily embarrassed so I don't mind acting a bit more confused than I am at times.  What are the methods that you might use to dig deeper when someone says they want a course but is less clear on the outcome they are looking for?

There is a lot to do in the realm of assessment, and instructional designers are expected to do quite a bit of it. Most instructional designers will have had experience with or exposure to The Kirkpatric Model, or the Kirkpatric 4 Levels of Evaluation and Assessment. There is more to assessment than just Kirkpatrick. In this video, I'll run through what I think are the essential topics to cover with regards to assessment for instructional designers and ask the very important question. What am I missing? Then in the next few days we can start to go through the important topics one at a time.

Where do programming skills fit into instructional design? This is a serious question and I'm sincerely curious. I've found that I don't use my programming or scripting skills much in instructional design with the exception of some light HTML and some light CSS. So I'm raising the question of how important are these skills and are HTML & CSS enough?

One thing that can be easy to forget when you dash off to do a video is to remember to watch and listen for your backgrounds. A poorly lit project or distracting background noise can cause costly rework in terms of both time and money. And the wrong type of content in the background can be devastating. This is especially true in education where having a FERPA violation comes with real consequences and is easy to happen if you have student identifiable information up in your area. Watch your backgrounds, both audio and visual. In this video, I share a quick tip and recommendation on how to help with the audio backgrounds.

Today I wanted to share Gagné’s Nine Events of Instruction which when considered in the design of a lesson can make that lesson much more effective. So just a quick overview of that the nine events are and how they can help make your instruction that much more effective.

Bloom isn’t the only game in town when it comes to trying to describe the different categories of learning and learning objectives. And I’m not talking about those who revised and updated his work such as Anderson or Simpson, no I’m talking about actual alternatives. One such alternative comes from Gagné, can you see the parallels as they describe the same phenomenon from different perspectives?

Out of all three of the domains of Bloom’s taxonomy, the Affective Domain seems to get the least amount of love. Which is a bit ironic since it’s the domain that deals with emotions, values, and character traits.

The domain is made up of five levels. Receiving, Responding, Valuing, Organizing, and Characterizing. So what do those mean? How can they be applied to help our students? And when and how should we leverage them?

The psychomotor domain of Bloom’s taxonomy doesn’t get as much love as the cognitive domain. Which is interesting to me since the psychomotor domain is the area where we teach skills involving movement or manipulation of stuff which in many cases is a significant amount of the teaching domain that we are responsible for.

So what’s in the psychomotor domain? And how can we use this to help our students?

Today I wanted to take a closer look at Blooms Cognitive Domain Taxonomy. Specifically, the revised taxonomy done by Anderson and his team in 2001. The revised taxonomy includes Remember, Understand, Apply, Analyze, Evaluate, and Create. But what does that mean and how is that supposed to help us design instruction or build a curriculum that helps our students succeed?

Most people have heard in passing about Bloom’s Taxonomy, especially if they are even remotely connected to education or training. But not as many know that there are actually three of Bloom’s Taxonomies. And almost no one remembers that Benjamin Bloom got his name on the spine of the first books on the subject by being the book’s editor not for coming up with the taxonomies on his own.

In this video, I give a REALLY brief walkthrough of the three domains of learning that Bloom and his team came up with and walk through the different categories of learning within each of those domains.