Before taking this course I believed that online instructional design was most applicable to delivering content one-way, a behaviorist approach, and summative assessment. Now I am seeing that I can integrate more contructivist, cognitivist, and connectivist concepts into my course design. However, I still believe that learning success in my context will depend on students' movement toward self-direction and intrinsic motivation; it will be up to me teach my less mature learners why they need to take responsibility for their learning and how to do it, and first they need more knowledge and learning experience. I agree with Kirschner and Sweller (2006): "The advantage of guidance begins to recede only when learners have sufficiently high prior knowledge to provide “internal” guidance." What I plan to have more of in the future:
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The one concept I have learned in this course and have started applying to immediate (subjective) positive effect is the cognitivist idea of chunking to avoid cognitive overload. At the beginning of the semester in a CLIL course, my teaching partner and I would assign a reading, subsequently lecture about it in class, and students would do some sort of activity. While I believe our activity design to be acceptable, we decided to start chunking our content delivery a bit more. 1) We did more pre-reading vocabulary work (mostly online and behaviorist in nature). 2) Students read less for homework. 3) We lectured a smaller amount, and then students had to immediately paraphrase (oral repetition) in pairs what they had read as homework and just finished listening to. This allowed us to formatively assess on the spot to what degree they understood what was being delivered so we could adjust our pace and difficulty level. We noticed that subsequent group discussions appeared to be more active after this change. Overall we ended up having to cut down on the amount taught, but students appeared to assimilate more.
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I definitely think they work in conjunction with each other. The behaviorist approach is more central at the beginning, when students need to learn objective content. This is needed as a foundation for further work requiring higher-level thinking skills, more conducive to contructivist and cognitivist approaches.
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