The client for Project A is Lecturer for the Liberal Studies Department at Texas A&M University at Galveston Campus. The type of courses this projects aims to review are historical and anthropological in regards to maritime history and oceanic scientific exploration. These courses are typically taught in person but due to Covid-19 all courses are now asynchronous. The future designs for this course have not been determined.
What types of analysis you chose to apply to Project A?
The types of analysis I choose to apply to this project will be multi-modal. After conducting a need assessment of the course selected for Project A, I have decided that a Learning Analysis is needed to determine the design approach for academic support. (Piskurich, 2015). The learning analysis will review the institutions accreditation, program accreditation, and course pedagogy. This analysis will inform the learning needs and shape the instructional design to meet the course learning objectives using the appropriate praxis. An Audience Analysis will also be used to understand the needs of the learner or as Piskurich (2015) states “to determine the characteristics of the target learners that will be critical for program development (pg. 104).
Which data collection methods do you choose to apply to your project A?
Three data collection methods will be used in a hybrid data-collection model. The data-collections tools used for Project A will be:
1. Focus group (via Zoom) will include historic principle instructors, deans, teaching assistants, and students in an open discussion to review the course’s historic goals, objectives, strategies, and outcomes.
2. Interviews with principle instructors and TAs using a fixed set of questions will provide insight about teaching philosophy, approach, expectations, and course goals.
3. Survey: a student-focused, five question Likert survey will provide information about the student perceived relevance of the assignments, difficulty of achieving course goals, knowledge of support services, and probability of using support services to learn course material.
What have you learned from the analysis? What are you planning to do with it?
The analysis of this course has uncovered a few key areas for improvement. One of the first areas of improvement is providing academic and student success orientation material to students asynchronously following the flipped class model of instruction in order for the students to have foundational understanding of services before live class visits from the services. Second, students need models to establish individual relevance of diverse academic services to their course work and diverse stages of their academic journey. And third, the faculty need to coordinate diverse academic services with the course work to understand the relationship of student success with coordinated learning in both course and academic support programs.
This review and the findings aim to improve the student learning through flipped instruction, increased visitation of academic support services, and coordinated teaching model suited for both synchronous and asynchronous learners.
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