Post 1

Dear Department Chair,

The curriculum we teach to our student is not designed and developed in light of the guidelines
laid down by ISD models. As a result, we see, the course we teach to our students does not fulfill
their needs. At the planning stage, it appears, required attention was not paid to students’ needs
and the problem was not clearly identified which we wanted to address through this course.
Though we had a goal for students to reach Interagency Language Roundtable (ILR) level 2 in
speaking by end of the course, we decided to teach them adjectives on the second day and
question words in the Week 8. Similarly, we teach them postposition first and simple past tense
later. Consequently, the way we designed the tasks and organized the content, it creates
enormous problems for students and doesn’t not prepare them reach ILR Level 2 where they, as
defined by ILR, “ can be able to satisfy routine social demands and limited work requirements.
They also cannot handle routine work-related interactions that are limited in scope.”

If we had followed ISD model, (1) we would have systemically analyzed how each task we had
designed helped our students to reach instructional objectives the course and (2) we also would
have paid more attention to instructional strategies to present the content best way possible to the
students so that they can master their learning objectives.

However, should you decide to revise current curriculum, there are a couple of things I would
like you to consider regarding ISD Model. Firstly, the model involves a number of layers such as
analyze, design, develop, implement, and evaluate, therefore, it will be time consuming process
and we should not expect new curriculum in near future. Secondly, since we will need more time
and probably more workforce to design an ISD Model-curriculum, therefore, it will have high-
cost too.

Your Sincerely,

Umer

Post 2

If you have an iPhone, iPad or iPod and you have not explored iTunes University so far, then I
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details, please clink on the link http://whatis.techtarget.com/definition/iTunes-U

i) New iPhones/iPads come with this app. Locate this app on your iPhone/iPad. If you don’t
have, please download from the App Store.
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Bay, and explore any topic of your interest.

iii) Then, you can add any course that you like to Your Courses, which you can access anytime
from your dashboard.

iv) After you open your course, you see an icon for materials in the right bottom. When you hit
that icon, you will see a variety of option including audio/video lectures and books available to
you.

You may start enjoying a new study material now.

Post 3 – Week 4 Discussion Forum: Benefits of Human Performance Technology

The simplest definition I came across while studying about Human Performance Technology put
forward by Judy Hale, President Chicago International Society for Performance Improvement
(ISPI), segmenting into three simple parts:

i) Human: it refers to us as people do the work.

ii) Performance: it is about actually doing the right work and doing it effectively.

iii) Technology: it is about a systematic process to identify what people require to do the
right work efficiently.

Harless (1995, p.75) defines HTP as “an engineering approach to attaining desired
accomplishments from human performers by defining gaps in performance and designing cost-
effective and efficient interventions.” Who doesn’t want a performance whose cost is
considerably lower than the results it produced have a higher value? I think we all do.

HTP approach allows individuals and organizations to draw a comparison between present and
desired levels of performance to identify the performance gap, do cause analyses, and design and
develop the interventions to address the gap. It also allows the organizations to improve people
performance by identifying and resolving the environmental barriers.

For us at Defense Language Institute, it does offer us a variety of ways to reach to our new goal
of 2+(Reading) , 2+(Listening) , 2 (Speaking) ILR levels, as the Department of Defense seemed
to have made an effort by describing these levels to change the approach of teachers about
teaching who come from different countries of world from focusing on what an instructor should
teach in the classroom to what a learner should be able to do as a result of instructions. When
DLI management put out new target of 2+, 2+, 2, there was and still is a growing resistance with
the voices like how can we achieve 2+, 2+, 2 with the same amount of time and resources when
we are barely getting 2, 2, 1+. However, this sort of resistance is very typical and every
organization faces it whenever it pushes through for a radical change.

The key challenge DLI faces is the way courses for some languages have been set up for a
typical study hour, expecting students to complete two reading activities and two listening
activities (totally unrelated to each other in some cases) in an hour. Maybe, this is still being
considered the best use of an hour in language learning institute in some countries of the world
today and If the instructors feel that their job is to finish the materials for each hour, not paying
attention to whether the students are learning, then it becomes obvious that the gap between the
current situation and desired level will remain there. This situation requires a performance
analysis as to why the instructors’ attention is on what they can teach in an hour not what their
students can learn, an intervention or series of interventions selection (trainings, news curriculum
etc.), implementation of intervention(s) and finally some evaluation.

Not one but many HPT models discuss how and when to change the performance gaps to
achieve the desired results. In DLI, we know where to look for problems but the question which
HTP model can answer is how to analyze the performance problems, design and develop
interventions and provide feedback to achieve the desired end.

Reference

C. (2012, April 16). Judy Hale on Chicago ISPI and Human Performance Technology. Retrieved
September 16, 2017.

Post 4 – Technology Incorporation Barriers

This week, the lines from the readings caught my attention was McCain’s (2005) elaboration
“the use of technology in the classroom is not the critical issue facing the education in the 21st
century. [Rather], the issue of foremost importance is to develop thinking skills in our students
so that they will be able to utilize the power of technological tools to solve problems and do
useful work” (p. 84). That, rightly so, raised a fundamental question whether providing
educational institutions with more access to technology would bring the desired change in the
way we teach and develop necessary critical thinking skills in our students so that they can solve
problems, a key objective of the modern education. To answer this question, Andrew (2007);
Hermans, Tondeur, van Braak & Valck (2008) concluded ‘teachers with constructive beliefs tend
to use technology to support student-centered curricula; those with traditional beliefs used
computers to support more teacher-directed curricula.” This issue is complex in nature as the
teachers with constructivist beliefs reported to have faced external barriers even when they
wanted to incorporate increased technology use in their classroom teachings. Ravitz, Becker, and
Wong (2000) concluded students’ individual needs, multiple objectives and expectations [to
produce good results] caused difficulties for the teachers who wanted to incorporate higher-level
of technology use.

DL Rogers (2000) observed, “there are three levels of technology adoption: a) personal
productivity aids, b) enrichment adds-in and c) paradigm shift (Massy & Zemsky, 1995). At DLI,
we see that personal productivity aids such as some applications that allow teachers and students
to complete familiar tasks fast and effectively and enrichment adds-in such as practices to inject
new materials into old content are widely used in all school houses. However, paradigm shift is
the area where we face barriers in terms of resistance to higher-level incorporation of technology
to achieve a transition from lecture-based teaching to student-centered learning. We, as an
institute, seem to have come to realization that it is not only technology that is important, but
also the learning/teaching methodologies that incorporate technology to transform ‘best’ old
teaching methods into ‘best’ new learning environment. I would also argue that the job
requirements of mostly DLI linguists that involve translation and transcription to some extent
also force teachers to resort to old methods of traditional teaching practices. DLI conducts
various courses such as Instructor Certification Course, workshops, and trainings to sensitize
teachers about importance of technology in the classroom but instructors in some languages if
not all find it hard to apply paradigm shift due to the way curricula are structured and activities
are designed hour by hour. Besides continuing training of instructors, a course should be
designed in way that provides an hour to hour framework and guide to teachers and students on
how to conduct business on daily basis. Unless fundamental changes to the curriculum happen,
we will continue to see teachers and students facing external barriers even when they even want
to incorporate higher-level of technology.

References:

McCain, T. D. (2005). Teaching for tomorrow: teaching content and problem-solving skills.
London: Sage.

Andrew, L, (2007). Comparison of teacher educators’ instructional methods with the

constructivist ideal. The Teacher Educator, 42(3), 157-184.

Hermans, R., Tondeur, J., van Braak, J., & Valcke, M. (2008). The impact of primary school
teachers’ educational beliefs on the classroom use of computers. Computers & Education, 51,
1499–1509. Hew, K. F., & Brush, T. (2007).

DL, Rogers (200). A Paradigm Shift: Technology Integration for Higher Level

Massy, W.F., & Zemsky, R. (1995). Using information technology to enhance academic
productivity. Presented at the 1995 CASUE Conference.

Post 5 – The Clark Team

This week, the lines really stuck out for me were from Clark’s paper, “We need to ask whether
there are other media or another set of media attributes that would yield similar learning
gains.” In this article, I would like explain as to why I decided to join the Clark Team. I have
experienced during my professional career, as Clark clearly defines, that how media and methods
are confounded by people as they often make the mistake that they think by just only changing
media, they will alter the learning or fix the problem. For example; at DLI, I noticed that pouring
the same content into Universal Curriculum Assessment Tool (UCAT), an online delivery tool,
did not influence students’ learning as they learnt equally when they did the similar tasks (such
as comprehension activities and drills etc.) using other mediums like textbooks. In case of the
UCAT experience, it changes the way the students access the content as it might make it easier
for the students to access it from home but it doesn’t mean that it improves their learning.

In Your Brain on Videogame: A TED Talk, Daphne Bavelier brings up how action videogames
help improve the vision. Though she appears to argue how technology improves cognitive
response, she did not validate that technology influences learning. Therefore, I conclude that she
didn’t seem to contradict the Clark’s position of media not influencing learning. It’s not the
videogame but it is the action that generates a certain kind of activity in the video-gamers’ brain
which increase their vision by defying scientific logic of excessive screen time harms the
eyesight. If a video-gamer brain is engaged in the similar activity through a different medium,
then it is likely that it will yield the similar results. I think it is very important for an instructional
designer to separate media from method as Clark points out, “the question is critical because if
different media or attributes yield similar learning gains and facilitate achievement of necessary
performance criteria, then in a design science or an instructional technology, we must always
choose the less expensive way to achieve a learning goal.”

David Merrill in his TED Talk (2013) makes a very valid argument a teacher made students who
were doing very poorly with other teachers to produce excellent results by only changing her
method of teaching. She proves that students with humble background can excel if correct
method/approach is applied. That also brings up the point that simply using a YouTube video in
the classroom is no guarantee that students will learn. At DLI, I have learnt that success only
happens when students are taught through right methods regardless of the medium. It did not
make any difference whether a student used a computer to read the target language or hardcopy
of a newspaper.

Kozma points out an example where students use computer based modeling to learn about
Newtonian mechanics. Though the students had shown that they learnt well but it may be the
case that it was not the media but the methods which were used involved practical level
interactions and hands-on activities that actually suited best to teach the Newtonian mechanics.

References:

Clark, R. E. (1994). Media will never influence learning. Educational technology research and
development, 42(2), 21-29.

Kozma, R. (1994). "Will media influence learning: Reframing the debate." Educational
Technology Research and Development, 42(2), 7-19.
[TEDx Talks]. (2013, September 25). The 5 principles of highly effective teachers: Pierre Pirard
at TEDxGhent [Video File]. Retrieved
from https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=3&v=_jdTtnWMLVM