The Kemp Design Model

The design model that best met my needs redesigning the Academic English course at a Korean university, would be the Kemp Model. The primary reason why this is the most appealing model is its flexibility in terms of what stage the designer can enter the design process. The Kemp Model allows the designer to address multiple steps or skip steps that might not be relevant to the designer's context or need (Forest, 2016). This model answered the challenges and realities that occurred this semester.

There are nine stages that are supported and informed by planning, evaluations, and revision. The stages are: identifying instructional design problems and specifying relevant goals, examining learner characteristics, identifying subject content and analyzing task components that are related to instructional goals, stating instructional objectives for the learners, sequencing content within each unit to sustain logical learning, designing instructional strategies for each learner to master the objectives, planning instructional delivery, developing evaluation instruments, and selecting resources to support learning activities (Akbulut, 2007). One area that the Kemp Design Model differs is the importance placed on identifying a problem that the instruction seeks to address. Another important element of this design is its flexibility letting the designer enter into the design process at any stage.

Learner Characteristics

The first step was to define and describe the learners. The majority of students are native Koreans with beginner to low intermediate language production skills but high-beginner to intermediate receptive language skills.The overwhelming majority of students in the courses I design and teach are first-year Korean university students. They have been learning English for over ten years in public schools but often the instruction they experience is the passive grammar-translation method. They have few opportunities to use English for authentic communication and for some of the students this may be one of the first times they are being taught by a native speaking English teacher. These students do have a strong grasp of technology and are comfortable utilizing mobile and computer-assisted language learning tools. Finally, students are divided within their departments into intermediate or advanced English courses based on the scores they received on the English section of the college entrance exam.

Instructional Problems/Task Analysis

The Academic English curriculum had already been designed as a two semester course using the QSkills series from Oxford University Press (Scanlon et al., 2015 and McVeigh & Bixby, 2015) in 2013. However, departmental demands required the curriculum to be redesigned to greater prepare students to succeed in their majors where many of the texts are in English. Two of the main demands were to have more major specific vocabulary and to prepare students to read academic texts and give academic presentations. It also was changed from a two semester to a one semester course occurring in the fall.

The instructional problem is related to the learner experience in Korea. Learning English as a Foreign Language (EFL) provides little opportunity for learners to practice using the target language outside of the classroom. Therefore, the problem for most language courses in Korea is how to manufacture these opportunities in a meaningful and authentic way in the classroom or online. Our university English course is a 16-week class that meets twice a week for 50-minute sessions. In order to supplement this short face-to-face (F2F) time, an online component is valuable as a flipped approach to better prepare the learners to succeed in the F2F session.

Evaluative Assessments/Learning Objectives

I addressed both the assessments and the objectives simultaneously with the input of a group of professors and the dean of the department over four weeks in May and June of 2018. We discussed and mapped out the objectives on a whiteboard and then finalized them in a Google Doc. The students would take four exams, two at 8 weeks, and two at 16 weeks. We decided to have a standardized midterm that tests students' listening and reading comprehension as well as the requisite vocabulary and grammar covered in the digital and paper-based learning materials. Students will also have a group discussion based off topics covered over the first 8 weeks as their speaking midterm. The final exams would include a pair presentation that the students would work on over the course of the semester and the written exam would ask students to write a paragraph or three paragraph essay depending on their English ability. Finally, we defined an appropriate weight for each exam in terms of the students' final grade and created rubrics for the subjective assessments.

Instructional Strategies/Instructional Message/Instructional Delivery/Content Sequencing

These four steps relate to what the learners will experience in the course and in what order. They are intimately related and could be defined and developed simultaneously. In order for the teaching faculty to understand the curriculum, instructional goals, and technological tools these materials and sequencing should be defined and created collaboratively. This would result in greater ownership and investment in the success of the curriculum (ISTE.C.3.f.)

To meet the departmental needs the original curriculum was redesigned into two streams, a science track, and a humanities track. The dean of the English Language department, through discussions with the publisher, created a textbook for each stream that was a combination of two series, Keynote (Stephenson et al., 2016) and 21st Century Reading (Blass at al., 2016). The two composite textbooks were similar for the first three units, and then diverged after that. The textbook was then analyzed for content that was aligned with the learning objectives.

In July 2018 we were awarded a grant in conjunction with the eLearning department and asked to develop a flipped learning program for this course. This gave us a little over a month to design and lay out 15 eLectures and quizzes that supported the curriculum. We quickly outlined what should occur online in the video lectures and offline in the classroom so that I could start contacting professors that would be willing to create and record an eLecture.

Professors were not eager to get in front of the camera and I needed to understand the process. I created a guideline based off what the eLearning department needed to help the professors feel at ease. We provided a PPT template and asked for a script typed in the notes section of each slide. Then we signed each participating professor up for a recording time and communicated these deadlines to all stakeholders.

We also asked the professor to create a ten question multiple choice quiz to accompany each video. I acted as editor during this process to help make their PPTs have appropriate cognitive load and ensure that their scripts were natural. Below you can see examples of one lectures; script, quiz, and finished video.

Conclusion

The development of a new curriculum should be a collaborative process between the designer and teachers. This process should be transparent and flexible in terms of planning and revision. The Kemp Model is one of the most flexible design models. It allows designers and teachers to enter the design process at various stages without disruption or confusion. It can be used effectively in the university setting to design curriculum for flipped learning language classes. Finally, it allows multiple parties to participate in the project and design and develop elements of the curriculum very rapidly.

References

Blass, L., Vargo, M., & Wisniewska, I. (2016). 21st Century Reading: Creative Thinking and Reading with TED Talks. National Geographic Learning.

Forest, E. (2016, December 12). Kemp Design Model. Retrieved from https://educationaltechnology.net/kemp-design-model/

ISTE Standards for Coaches. (2017). Retrieved from https://www.iste.org/standards/for-coaches

ISTE Standards for Educators. (2017). Retrieved from https://www.iste.org/standards/for-educators

McVeigh, J., & Bixby, J. (2015). Q: Skills for Success. Reading and Writing. Oxford University Press.

Scanlon, J., Snow, M. A., Zwier, L. J., & Zimmerman, C. B. (2015). Q: skills for success: listening and speaking. Oxford University Press.

Stephenson, H., Lansford, L., & Dummet, P. (2016). National Geographic, CENGAGE Keynote. Upper Intermediate.

Sun, X. (2001). An investigation of instructional design models for Web-based instruction. Dissertation Abstracts International, 62(02). (UMI No. AAT 3004521).