The Course Project

This is a project-based course that focuses on a real-world instructional need. The course is designed as a service-learning experience (see below) to support an important social cause. You will gain instructional design experience while developing instructional materials that will be made available for free to adult educators and their learners. While this course is geared to individuals working alone, you are welcome to work on the instructional design project with others, including as part of a class project or practicum in an instructional design program. The following is an overview of the instructional design project.

You are asked to develop open educational resources (OER) for adult basic education based on the following project requirements:

The instructional materials you design and develop will support adult learners with low math and literacy skills seeking to acquire new knowledge and skills to pursue their life goals and career aspirations. Most of these adult learners have not completed high school, and are taking adult basic education courses as they prepare for careers, high school equivalency exams (e.g., the GED, HiSET, or TASC tests), or other adult basic education certifications.
The contextualized instruction you design will target the knowledge and skills needed to be life, career, or college ready, and will focus on authentic contexts, problems, and tasks the learners will encounter in real life.
You are able to select the real-world problem or task, and the associated knowledge and skills, that will be the focus of your lesson, as well as the intended learner audience and grade level.
The instructional materials you design and develop will:

conform to the project's Design Guide,
be developed within Open Author on OER Commons,
align with the College and Career Readiness Standards (CCRS) that underlie high school equivalency exams and other adult basic education programs,
incorporate guidance for the instructor implementing the lesson,
include all necessary content presentation, learner practice, and assessment materials for instruction on the topic and standard you have chosen.

Instructional materials selected for use will be stored in the Adult Learning Zone group on OER Commons and licensed under a Creative Commons copyright license as free open educational resources (OER). To ensure the broadest use of your work, we request that you select a Creative Commons CC BY 4.0 license.
All instructional materials you develop must be open educational resources that (a) our instructors and learners can retain, reuse, revise, remix, and redistribute without additional login or paywall, and (b) can be linked or embedded within Open Author.

Service Learning: Gain Experience for Good

This course is a service-learning experience where you will gain experience for good. Service learning is an educational approach that incorporates academic coursework with opportunities for applied learning. Service learning is a unique form of experiential learning in that community service is a central component of the experience. A hallmark of service learning is the reciprocal benefit gained by the learner from the experience, and by the community from the service provided.

Service Learning

Course Learning Objectives

By the end of this course, you should be able to conduct the following instructional design processes:

Analyze: Within Modules 1 and 2, you will analyze key aspects of the design need. In Module 1, you will consider the learners and the the learning context. In Module 2, you will dive into the requirements of the project, including an examination of the College and Career Readiness Standards.
Synthesize: Within Modules 2 and 3, you will make your first attempts at generating possible solutions to meet the instructional design need. You will contemplate established instructional principles to design instructional strategies to support learning. You will also explore and analyze available free and openly licensed open educational resources (OER) that you can adapt to meet the requirements of this project.
Simulate: Within Modules 4 and 5, you will take the ideas swirling in your head and develop draft representations of your design conception. In Module 4, you will offer a representation of your ideas within a written design proposal. This will be followed in Module 5 with your development of a second design iteration, a prototype of your instructional materials based on your written design proposal.
Evaluate: Within Module 6, you will assess whether your draft design representation (i.e. prototype) is meeting the needs and constraints of this project through self, peer, and expert evaluation activities. Evaluation forces a designer to critically examine the efficacy and efficiency of the instruction in light of the design need.
Decide: Within Module 7, you will make your final design decisions as you prepare your final deliverable based on the feedback you have received through self, peer, and expert evaluation of your design prototype. As your final assignment in this course, you will submit the instructional materials you have designed and developed. Those who submit final deliverables that meet the design criteria will be invited to include their instructional materials on the Designers for Learning Adult Learning Zone group in OER Commons.

Bonus Challenge

A Bonus Challenge is offered to those who have successfully completed Modules 1 through 7 of this course and want to take on a Do-It-Yourself* (DIY) independent study opportunity to develop their adult basic education instructional materials as an online lesson within the Canvas learning management system (LMS), and to share their instructional materials as open educational resources (OER) on Canvas Commons, an OER repository managed by Canvas.

As this is a independent study opportunity, you will spend time on your own reviewing the Canvas Guides (Links to an external site.) to learn how to use the features of the Canvas LMS and the Canvas Commons OER repository. The Canvas Guides are excellent (and what we used when learning how to use Canvas to design and facilitate this course). In addition, there is a special Discussion Forum for this Bonus Challenge for peer-to-peer sharing and comparing.

* Please note: Given the number of students enrolled in this course, our facilitators don't have the capacity to answer Canvas-related development questions or to provide support on the use of Canvas, which is why this Bonus Challenge opportunity is described as a DIY independent study.