by Thomas Tobiason

Introduces some methods of curriculum design and instructional design that can assist teachers in updating existing curriculum or creating units of curriculum from scratch for both classroom instruction and online instruction.

About This Class

What is this course about?

Given the course title, this course has something to do with the intersection of curriculum design and educational technology. Among the many connections we can identify between curriculum design and educational technology, our focus here will be to address designing for the use of technology in curriculum to enhance the educational experiences of students, and designing for the use of technology to deliver the educational experiences to students.

These two uses form the basis of two of the goals for the course. In addition, we will add a systematic look at curriculum design in general. Accordingly, we will address these three goals this quarter.

• Exploring curriculum design and instructional design models in the abstract.
• Planning to include the effective use of technology in classroom instruction to enhance the educational experiences of students given today’s constraints of the WASL and NCLB.
• Planning for the use of technology to deliver educational experiences to students. We will refer to this as “technology mediated” instruction. “Technology mediated” instruction is known as "distance learning", "web based training", and "e-learning" (among others).

We will explore a number of instructional design models, compare them with each other, and see how to apply them to the problem of actually designing curriculum. In the case of simply updating existing curriculum (as opposed to designing from scratch) we will use an abstract model of technology integration. Our exploration of e-learning will be structured by a long term assignment where you actually creating a web based unit of instruction. You will use an instructional design model of your choosing to design our e-learning unit (you may even design your own model!). Your design efforts will result in the creation of formal design documents which will, I turn, guide the development of your e-learning materials.