Overview

In the prior modules, you took a deep dive into the discovery of the learner’s needs, challenges, and opportunities, and began to lay out a map for your instruction. In this module, you will formalize your design plan to meet those needs, challenges, and opportunities while meeting the project's design requirements. If you were designing this project for a client, your plan would arise from discussion and negotiation with your client about the project's design requirements. For this design project, we relied on the advice of our panel of subject matter experts who helped us to established a short, but important list of project requirements.

The Project Requirements

Designers will develop open educational resources 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 (i.e. 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 (Links to an external site.),
align with the College and Career Readiness Standards (Links to an external site.) (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 in the Adult Learning Zone group on OER Commons (Links to an external site.)will be licensed under a Creative Commons copyright license (Links to an external site.) 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 (Links to an external site.).
All instructional materials you develop must be open educational resources that (a) our instructors and learners can retain, reuse, revise, remix, and redistribute (Links to an external site.) without additional login or paywall, and (b) can be linked or embedded within Open Author.

The Project Design Guide

The instructional materials you design and develop must conform to the Design Guide that was created to assist you in creating a lesson that meets the project requirements and the instructional need. Much like an architect’s blueprint, the project requirements and the Design Guide for this project describes the who, what, where, when, why, and how of the lesson. Since we will be referring to the Design Guide throughout the course, a link to the Design Guide document appears in the left navigation menu on each page of this course, as shown on the figure below:

Design Guide Navigation.jpg

We will spend the majority of this Module reviewing the Design Guide. To help set the stage for what we will cover in this module, please take a few minutes to open and skim through the three parts of the Design Guide.

Lesson Description.png

As you can see, the Design Guide addresses the focus and scope of the lesson, and guides you as you answer the following questions:

Who is the audience for this lesson?
What skills and knowledge are targeting within the learning experience?
What is the intended grade level of the lesson?
What materials will be required?