15/5 Week Fifteen

I can't believe the end of the semester is almost here. It has been an extremely busy week once again for our team. The team met at 2pm on Sunday, and most of us stayed on campus until about midnight working on our modules. I am really proud of the work we've been doing - it has been truly a formative evaluation process for us. We've received feedback from Alissa and some feedback at the dress rehearsal that's caused us to rework some small details in the modules, mostly to do with how the videos are integrated. We added cue points to the dock talk FLV so an outline will appear on the instruction screen as Vicky (the whale guide) talks to the learners. We also tried to include more text in the instruction that relates to the video.

The major purpose of the video is to "situate" the learner on a whale-watching trip. Obviously, a video on a computer is not the most ideal way to situate the learners on a whale-watching trip, but we tried to work with the platform to the best of our abilities. We were also constrained by the video that was available to us.

A secondary purpose of the video is to provide some examples of the information we're teaching. For example, when the instruction is discussing blowholes, we show actual video of a whale blow from Dr. Schell's Whale Class. At this point in the instruction, the video is both reinforcing the material and situating the learner. We only had a few opportunities to use the video in this fashion because the video wasn't clear enough or detailed enough to show things like a whale's baleen in action or the ventral pleats on a whale's belly. This material had to be reinforced with images or illustration instead of video.

I'm a little frustrated at this point because we have worked so hard on this project and I still think there are things that could be improved or changed. However, I do think that we've succeeded in creating really great instruction for seventh graders, which was our ultimate goal. We've already gotten some useful feedback from our alpha testers and hopefully we'll get more good feedback at tomorrow's beta test.

Here's a link to the beta version of our modules: Learning Whale Morphology