15/5s - Week of March 21 through March 28, 2016

Instructional strategy plays a vital role in the successful delivery of instructions and learners achievement. This week we spent a lot of time in developing our instructional strategy. The instructional strategy provides the guidelines to develop and select instructional materials to attain the instructional goal. The instructional goal, the learners’ and context analysis, the performance objectives, and the assessment items are utilized as inputs to develop instructional strategy along with other learning theories. The instructional strategy first addressed the need for choosing a suitable approach for sequencing and clustering instructions. Keller’s (2010) ARCS model was used to plan and design instructional materials to motivate the learners. Dick and Carey’s five learning components were followed to guide learners’ intellectual processing through different mental states and activities to optimize learning. Assessment instruments developed in the previous step helped tailor instruction to the needs of learners. Follow-through activities are identified to facilitate transfer of skills from learning to performance environment. 

       Treatment report is also an important document to design the user interfaces to seek the approval from the client and to develop a set of standard for the entire development team to follow during the development phase to ensure consistent look and feel. This week we completed the treatment report partially without the detail of the user interfaces and visual diagrams and pictures.  

        This process helped me to understand the need of consistent look and feel, and how to achieve it in a group development environment. Client's input in this process was very helpful as they have a firsthand experience of the learners liking and ability. Now I have a better understanding of linking instructional strategies to optimize learning outcomes. I plan to utilize Dick and Carey’s five learning components in any future instructional development as  part of core instructional strategy.

           Though initially I thought all these documents are unnecessary overhead and wastage of time and energy; now I can see a clear value of doing all these steps in a logical pattern to optimize learning outcomes. While it is possible to coordinate among the team members through Google hangout and other online tools; we found that a face to face interaction is much more educational and efficient in accomplish jointly developed task.

            Asking questions and learning from the peers and Dr. Weaver is a unique and enlightening experience. Laerning a lot of different prespectives by watching the screencasts from my peers. These resources are continuously helping me to think hard and understand new dimentions of any task at hand. Finally, watching Dr. Weaver’s screencast provides a clear guideline on how to deal with so many moving parts without getting overwhelmed. I would like to apply the techniques I am learning from Dr. Weaver and my teammates to utilize in my future teaching profession.

           Learning project management process and learning how to work successfully in team set up are two of the essential skill sets for any profession. To master these skill set one needs both pedagogical backbone and practical experiences. I am seeing progress from both of these ends slowly but steadily! Finally, learning is a continuous journey, not the destination! 

My task list for week three:

Task	Percent Complete	Time Spent in hrs
Weekly Group Meeting	100%	1
Contribute to the discussion in G+	100%	1.5
Develop Instructional Strategy	100%	7
Discussion and feedback on Instructional strategy	100%	2
Update project tasks/sub-tasks in Asana	100%	.5
Keep up with Dr. Weaver's post and screencasts, taking surveys	100%	1
Discussion and development of  Initial Treatment Report	100%	8
Screen-cast Preparation and presentation	100%	3
Posted 15/5s for my blog	100%	.5
Watching screen-cast posted by other Peers	100%	1