Objective 1:
Apply foundational knowledge and skills to the collaborative design and use of content, pedagogy and instructional technologies.
For this objective, I selected two works that show how I applied foundational knowledge and skills in the research, development, and presentation of historic events and educational theories, in order to understand accessibility and assessment in instructional design.
Historical Timeline
I chose to explore the history of instructional design through the lens of accessibility to better understand how the concept of Universal Design was developed and then adapted for educational technology. This artifact meets Objective 1 as it shows application of foundational knowledge and skills to the design and use of content, pedagogy, and instructional technologies.
To build the timeline, I first selected key developments and summarized the relevant content from several academic sources, so learners could see how intertwined these concepts have been since inception. I chose Adobe Express to produce the timeline, partially to explore a new-to-me tool and partially because of its clean and simple template design. Recently, I have used Figma to stitch the original split image into a single image and add an arrow to unify.
By matching the graphic format of a timeline to the concept of understanding change over time in the instructional design field, this infographic uses assimilation theory to map new information about historical events to my existing knowledge of instructional design and accessibility.
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Concept Map
I used Lucidchart to build the map, but my initial design was not well-anchored; I misunderstood how to describe the links among different statements and concepts within the map. I relied too heavily on visual information (color-coding for both labels and corner dots, bolded text) and did not effectively summarize the individual concepts.
My final draft was built after getting feedback from the instructor and from classmates, and I also extensively reviewed examples and explanations of other concept maps available online. I was more specific with my question to better frame the linked concepts that directly answered, I drastically simplified the concepts represented by each label, and improved how I labeled the connections among the represented concepts.
This artifact meets Objective 1 as it required me to synthesize educational theories to better understand how assessments provide evidence of learning, given a specific set of initial conditions for learning. Further, I needed to iteratively refine how I communicated this information, based on feedback from target audiences.
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Initial draft of the concept map. Without an example map to ground my understanding, I struggled to conceptualize the links between the question and concepts.
Final draft of the concept map. After peer review and discussion, and with support from the instructor, I refined the question and reframed the connections among the concepts to better express my answer.
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