EDF5861 S2 2025: Assessment 2 - Expanding curriculum opportunities

Assignment 2: "Expanding curriculum opportunities"

Explanation

When teachers select or create digital learning materials and activities it is with the intention of supporting learners and learning.

However, not all materials or activities are efficient, effective or even have a positive impact.

This assignment asks you to use the knowledge and skills from this unit and your wider reading to design, create, and then critique digital learning materials and a collaborative digital learning activity. The key to this assignment is not how technologically proficient you are, but rather, the depth to which you have adopted a critical perspective in the explanation and analysis of the learning object or activity, evaluating its merits in relation to the relevant theory, instructional models and literature.

The task

Design a static learning object (approx. 600 words)

Your task is to design a static learning object. Examples of static learning objects are slides, infographics, posters, Google Docs, etc. If you are uncertain, you can contact your lecturer. The technical skill of creating the object is not the focus of assessment.

We are interested in seeing the depth of you thinking around the design for your learners, not how flashy the object is.

What to include:

·   Headings

·   Explain who your learners are and how this resource is intended to be used (brief - under 100 words).

·  State the learning objective(s). Remember to construct your learning objective so that it is measurable and

achievable [suggestion: Draw on Blooms Taxonomy or SOLO or other systems to help you develop useful LOs. Also keep it focused - perhaps only one or two learning objectives].

·   Explain your design decisions in relation to they theory, literature, and course content. Most learning materials are limited in

some way or could be improved. A high quality submission could draw on literature to suggest how/why it should be improved. This is the most important part of your assignment.

Create an instructional video (approx. 600 words)

Create an instruction video, something that teaches an idea. This is essentially the same task as part 1, however, it is for a video based artefact.

Instructional videos explain/teach a topic or idea. This could be a talking head, screencast, animation, or other. This video should be around 2 minutes. If you go longer, you can indicate which two minutes you would like us to watch. Remember, we are not marking you on your video content or skills. We are interested in knowing about your design decisions - what choices did you make, what did you choose to include, what did you choose to exclude, why, etc. We strongly recommend that you do not spend overly long on editing or post-production of your video.

What to include:

·   Headings

·   Explain who your learners are and how this resource is intended to be used (brief - under 100 words).

·  State the learning objective(s). Remember to construct your learning objective so that it is measurable and

achievable [suggestion: Draw on Blooms Taxonomy or SOLO or other systems to help you develop useful LOs. Also keep it focused - perhaps only one or two learning objectives].

·   Explain your design decisions in relation to they theory, literature, and course content. Most learning materials are limited in

some way or could be improved. A high quality submission could draw on literature to suggest how/why it should be improved. This is the most important part of your assignment.

Design a learning activity (approx. 800 words)

Teachers need to develop strategies for engaging learners in online collaborative activities. You may be in a 'remote' learning situation or teaching to a hybrid/blended class. Design a learning activity that uses a collaborative digital technology/ies, for example, Padlet.

These technologies focus on digital collaboration so your activity should have a collaborative component. The activity could be  synchronous or asynchronous; students may be in the same geographic location or not. The activity does not need to be a whole lesson and may form. part of a lesson.

If you would like to use a different technology, please confirm with your lecturer first.

What to include:

·   Headings

·   Explain who your learners are and how this resource is intended to be used.

·  State the learning objective(s). Remember to construct your learning objective so that it is measurable and

achievable [suggestion: Draw on Blooms Taxonomy or SOLO or other systems to help you develop useful LOs. Also keep it focused - perhaps only one or two learning objectives].

In addition, for this object:

·   Explain why you have chosen this activity to be synchronous or asynchronous?

·   Explain the collaborative nature of this task and why it was designed this way.

·   Explain the learning activity. Use screenshots, screencasts, or drawings to help your explanation.

·   Explain your design decisions by drawing upon theory, literature from the course, or activities from class as much as you can. It is important to explain how this activity supports or achieves the learning objectives.

·   Discuss the implications of using this technology. Why might it enhance the learning activity over alternative digital or non-digital technologies?

References

You can include references for each part, or you can provide them all together at the end. The references are not part of the word count and you need to use a consistent form. of citation and referencing style. This unit asks you to use APA formatting.

If students use generative artificial intelligence to create work submitted for assessment, it must always be acknowledged

Sources

We encourage you to read broadly and use that knowledge in the design of your materials and activities. However, it is very important for you to be critical of the nature of the reading. In particular, please be very cautious of the immense amount of self- published materials online (e.g. blogs, websites, etc.). These websites often will provide advice about the design of instructional material but they do not reveal the basis of the claim. In your assignment, you should give more credence to books, articles, and  authoritative websites that are founded on peer-review or other forms of quality control. This does not mean you cannot use other sites to inform. your thinking, but you should apply a critical perspective and not rely on them solely.

Presentation requirements

This assignment could be completed on a blog site and submitted as a URL (however, it is strongly recommended that an offline copy of the assignment is kept in case the website goes down). Alternatively, it can be submitted as a .doc or .pdf file.